"The Bear" <bu**********@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:XN********************@rogers.com...
Even if the phone itself doesn't have an additional port on the back of
the computer, it can still be connected to the computer through a
splitter. With that being said... assuming all the hardware is in place...
How difficult does it become to get caller id?
T.B.
Not terribly difficult, especially if you've done any serial programming.
Assuming you plug the phone line into your PC's modem, and your modem is
recognized as, say, COM2 to the PC, you would just write code to open the
COM port, send the appropriate AT command for your particular modem to tell
it you're interested in caller ID info (it was AT#CID=1 for my modem when I
did this four or five years ago) and then listen for data coming into your
serial connection. The data you receive will be a simple string containing
exactly what you'd see on a caller ID box or phone - the number, name if
available, date/time stamp, etc...
There's no serial support in .NET 1.x, though, so to start you'll need to
find/write some code for that. There are several .NET serial libraries
available online, both open- and closed-source, so just Google for that.
Next, you'll want to figure out exactly what make/model modem you have and
go to the manufacturers website to find documentation about the AT commands
it accepts, looking for the one to enable caller ID info. Beyond that, it's
shouldn't be more than a dozen lines of code to open the port (assuming
you're not writing your own serial port code), send the AT command and wait
for the data to come in.
Good luck,
Ryan LaNeve