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I'm just gonna go off the limits and ask you a really specific question. There's a card reader device in my office that's connected to the Ethernet card. Below is a screenshot of the configuration window of this card reader's program(distributed with the program).

enter image description here

There is an IP Address, a port, and it says COM3 and there is Baud rate. Distributed program is working fine. It fetches data from the device.

My question is, how can i get the data from this device? Do i have to make a socket connection?

Note : In the distributed programs' folder there is no DLL associated. Only VB6 program DLL's. (By the way the distributed program has been developed in VB6).

Thanks for your ideas.

UPDATE :

Here is my final code.

 byte[] b = null;
    TcpClient client = new TcpClient("10.1.2.100", 5005);
    client.SendBufferSize = 6550000;
    NetworkStream stream = client.GetStream();
    MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();

    int count = 0;
    do
    {
        byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
        count = stream.Read(buffer, 0, 1024);
        ms.Write(buffer, 0, count);
    } while (stream.CanRead && count > 0);
    b = ms.ToArray();

But NetworkStream 's DataAvailable property is false..

ward87
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1 Answers1

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If that program does not run on the computer that has the device linked to its COM port, it has to access it through TCP/IP (given the info in your question).

So if you access the IP 10.1.2.100 on port 5005, you should be able to talk to the device.

CodeCaster
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  • When i connect the device with TcpClient class and i try to read data i get "This stream does not support seek operations." exception. – ward87 May 09 '12 at 11:39
  • @ward87 that is because you [cannot seek a socket](http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-ZA/csharpgeneral/thread/139fd7ea-6e8e-46b1-a444-00db31583dc0), so you'll have to seek another solution, pun intended. You have to read all data, and can skip through the resulting string (or byte array) to get to the data you're looking for. – CodeCaster May 09 '12 at 11:41
  • I managed to connect to the device but when i tried to read data i get the following error. "Unable to read data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host." Do you have any idea what's causing this? – ward87 May 09 '12 at 11:59
  • You ar probably not using the correct protocol or the other distributed program is already running and the device will only allow one connection. – Martin James May 09 '12 at 12:02
  • @ward87 using a tool like Wireshark you can check the protocol the other program is using as Martin James suggests. Perhaps you need to send some kind of 'hello' to the server. – CodeCaster May 09 '12 at 12:17