Bluetooth and COM port emulation

[Nathan Young]

Hello. I have a .net application that utilizes COM ports to
communicate with serial devices (namely a GPS).

This may not be the right group for this question, but bear with me as
I am not sure where else to ask. (I would appreciate any NG
pointers).

Anyway, my application uses CreateFile and ReadFile to setup a COM
port for the GPS, and then to read the data from the GPS.

I recently changed from an RS-232 based GPS to a bluetooth wireless
GPS. Using the bluetooth driver software on my tablet PC, I am able
to emulate a COM port and have the BT GPS appear as COM8 on my
machine.

This works fine, however it is cumbersome to setup the emulated COM
port and I wish my application could do it for the user (which is me).
For those not familiar with the BT COM port emulation process, each
time the PC boots and you want to use the COM port - you have to do
the following:

#1 View BT devices in range
#2 Select a device
#3 Pair the device (using a unique PIN assigned to that device)

This process requires me to scale several menus, and input data from a
stylus. It is cumbersome at best, and dangerous at worst (I am using
this software in an airplane, and should be spending time flying the
plane - not fumbing through menus on my tablet PC).

So getting to my question: Does anyone know how to use the .net
environment or win32 or whatever platform to view, select, and pair a
BT device. And then to configure it as a emulated COM port?

I have done a number of google searches on the subject, but cannot
find any code examples.

Thanks!
-Nathan

[William DePalo [MVP VC++]]

"Nathan Young" <na****@needles centered.com> wrote in message
news:8q******** *************** *********@4ax.c om...

Hello. I have a .net application that utilizes COM ports to
communicate with serial devices (namely a GPS).

This may not be the right group for this question, but bear with me as
I am not sure where else to ask. (I would appreciate any NG
pointers).
...
This process requires me to scale several menus, and input data from a
stylus. It is cumbersome at best, and dangerous at worst (I am using
this software in an airplane, and should be spending time flying the
plane - not fumbing through menus on my tablet PC).

So getting to my question: Does anyone know how to use the .net
environment or win32 or whatever platform to view, select, and pair a
BT device. And then to configure it as a emulated COM port?

You may want to post again in the kernel group

microsoft.publi c.win32.program mer.kernel

If Win32 provides a way to map blue tooth devices to COM ports, somebody
there ought to know.

On the other hand, if the mapping is handled privately bu the GPS device's
driver you may be out of luck.

Regards,
Will