Virtual Serial Port Activex and Virtual Serial Port Software for Windows

Virtual Serial Port Control
$199.95 - FabulaTech, Inc.

If there is a task to provide interaction between communications application and your own program (e.g. serial device emulator), there is no common solution to accomplish it. It is considered that communications applications are intended to work only with hardware serial devices connected to physical serial ports.

Virtual Serial Port Control is an ActiveX control which makes it possible to create virtual serial ports directly from your program and fully control them. At the same time virtual ports look like real hardware serial ports for all Windows applications. And any communications application can work with them as if they were physical ports.

On the other hand, developer API provided by Virtual Serial Port Control allows your program to access data written to virtual serial port by communications application and to respond with your own data. The data will be read by communications application from virtual serial port as if they were read from a physical port.

Event driven architecture is a snap to use. You don't have to check ports periodically in order to find if their state is changed or new data available for reading from a port. Simply define a function in your program that will be triggered automatically by the appropriate event and process the data.

At the same time Virtual Serial Port Control immediately notifies your application about any actions done by communications application with serial port (port opening/closing, setting DTR/RTS handshake, baud rate setting, XON/XOFF symbols setting, etc).

Virtual Serial Port Control provides developer with full control over virtual serial port. Everything that can be done with physical serial port by a serial device is possible to be done with virtual serial port by VSPC.

What is more important, OEM license allows you to distribute this ActiveX control as part of your own application and you don't have to license every single copy.

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Virtual Serial Port SDK
$49 - Franson

Using Virtual Serial Port SDK you can create a "new" serial port on your computer. This serial port is completely controlled by your application. Other 3rd party applications can connect to this serial port and believe it is a normal physical port. In this way you can emulate all kinds of hardware normally connected to a serial port, emulate a null modem, and so on.

Virtual Serial Port SDK is available for .NET and ActiveX, on all Windows platforms Windows Mobile/Pocket PC, Windows XP/2k/NT and Windows ME/98. Samples in C#, VB.NET and VisualBasic 6.0 are included.

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Serial Port Control
$99.95 - FabulaTech, Inc.

Software developers can access various devices by utilizing the Windows API. When using an API, you gain access to a full spectrum of available features, but API programming is a very tough and time-consuming task. You have to study the documentation and you have to create all the high-level functionality based on the low-level API functions from scratch. This is OK if you develop a specialized application. However, in most cases, you just want to get a certain device working in your program with the least effort possible.

One of the system devices that you often need to support is a Serial Port. There are numerous lab instruments, protection gadgets and other inventory that can be connected via a COM port. Instead of spending weeks or even months for API coding, you could use a ready-made ActiveX component in your program. We recommend you give Serial Port Control from FabulaTech a try.

Serial Port Control is an inexpensive, royalty-free, ActiveX component. You can use it with any ActiveX-enabled development environment, such as Visual C++, Visual Basic, Delphi, etc. Just put it on a form and you have all the functionality you need to access a serial port, either physical or virtual.

Serial Port Control automatically enumerates all the ports available in the system. You just need to select the port name you wish to work with. The event driven architecture of this component is a snap to use. You don't have to check ports periodically in order to find if there is new data available for reading from a port. Simply define a function in your program that will be triggered automatically by the appropriate event and process the data.

Despite its low cost, the component is royalty-free. There are no hidden fees and you are free to distribute it together with your own software.

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COM Port Splitter
$99.95 - Virtual Serial Port Software

COM Port Splitter establishes serial connection and implements data transmission between COM-ports and applications, or any kind of serial port devices.When Splitter is used to split only real ports and connects them to other physical serial ports, no virtual ports are created. Virtual serial ports are based on a technology by Eltima and are used to connect several applications to the same COM-port. Splitter creates several virtual copies of a COM-port. Applications refer to corresponding virtual ports (for instance, COM2, COM3), which send data to the real COM1 and to a connected device. Then, all data a real port receives from the device is transferred to the applications via virtual ports. Serial Splitter splits one com port (either real or virtual) into several ones, which are exact copies of the original port in the system. For instance, it splits real COM1 into virtual COM2, COM3, COM4 ports. To create a pure virtual ports pair you might also try VSPD XP. Here's a real-life example: A sale on a cash register is made. The cash register sends text via a serial port (COM1) to a computer. The software on the receiving computer takes the text from the serial port, and prints some of it to a video file. Using COM Port Splitter one-to-many ports splitting, this information can be viewed from several computers or applications. COM Port Splitter joins any number of COM ports into one serial port, allowing information from several devices to be received by a single application connected to the port at the OUT side of the bundle. For example: 100 websites are hosted on 100 computers. Via null modem a certain data is delivered from these computers to a PC with a microcontroller. On this PC COM Port Splitter joins com-ports and sends all dataflow to a one virtual serial port. Single application receives and represents all information about the status of a 100 server hosts simultaneously.

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FastReport CLX
$99 - Fast Reports, Inc.

Added:
- compatibility with FastReport 2.5 VCL
- Bitmaps export BMP
- advanced HTML export
- TfrReport properties: ReportComment, ReportName, ReportAutor,
ReportDate, ReportLastChange, ReportPasswordProtected, ReportPassword,
Advanced ReportVersion (major, minor, release, build)
- Global script variables ReportComment, ReportName, ReportAutor,
ReportDate, ReportLastChange, ReportPasswordProtected, ReportPassword,
Advanced ReportVersion (major, minor, release, build)
- Save to FR3.0 Xml format optional in Designer
- Prepared page run-time modification
- FieldIsNull function in script

FastReport CLX edition is the first powerful cross-platform report generator for Delphi and Kylix. Using
FastReport CLX edition, you can create highly efficient cross-platform reports for Windows and Linux with a minimum of manual coding.
FastReport's development environment includes a Visual Report Designer, Visual Dialog Designer,
Object Inspector, and Component Palette.
You can develop cross-platform reports with cross-platform 32-bit applications that run on both the
Linux and Windows operating systems.
You can open any .frf files made with previous versions of FastReport VCL in FastReport CLX.

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FastReport VCL
$99 - Fast Reports, Inc.

With full source code, royalty-free!
Dot-matrix printer support, XML-based export filters
FastReport provides many features not found in other reporting products.
Import legacy databases and reuse common database formats
FastReport supports the following database mechanisms:
BDE, DbExpress (only D6 and Kylix), ADO, IBX, FIB, NativeDB, IBO, DAO, FlashFiler, DBISAM, SQLDirect

Supports "live" queries.
Easily organize access to any part of your application data.
FastReport makes it easy to create databases in other formats as well.
Let your users change reports using the runtime designer without having to change any of your program code. FastReport uses a unique internal format for reports that gives them independence from your applications.

- Report variables are easy to use for creating new EndUser-reports.
- End users can easily change a form to add new fields to the report as needed.
- You can give users the option to edit the generated report!

FastReport?s powerful feature set provides the tools for creating masterful reports:
- Built-in dialog designer for setting entry conditions.
- Built-in Pascal-like macrolanguage with an extensive set of functions.
- Process events on the generated report. One mouse click retrieves the detailed report.
- Built-in possibility of search of the text in the generated report!
- Unlimited number of pages in the report
- WYSIWYG-preview with smooth rescaling and scrolling options.
- Display multiple pages simultaneously!
- Composite reports make combining reports easy!
- Generate cross-tab-reports without knowing the number of columns beforehand. Cross-tab reports are automatically beaten to the necessary number of pages on a horizontal orientation.
- A large number of components made by third party developers are available. Developed specifically for use with FastReport, these components extend FastReport?s functionality even more.

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