[Mono-dev] Serial ports in mono - event notification

[Dries Naudts]

Dear Eric,

thank you very much for your detailed information. I will consider your 
polling technique. Since I'm not sure whether mono will support serial 
events soon, it seems like a good solution for both environments.

Kind regards,
Dries


Engler, Eric wrote:
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>> What is the current status on the event notification mechanism of 
>> serial ports in  Mono? 
>>     
>
> I can't comment on the Mono status question but I thought I'd pass along
> a lesson I learned about serial events in Windows. They are notoriously
> late in many cases due to buffering. They are supposed to occur quick
> enough to let you stream at a high baud rate, but Windows XP tries to
> reduce the frequency of the events because it can cache the data (it
> caches a lot more than the small UART cache buffer). This is maddening
> for people like me who want to know immediately when a byte has been
> received. 
>
> If you only need a relatively low baud rate, or if you can tolerate a
> delay in notification, this may be fine. In my case I needed 115K baud
> and I had to know immediately when a byte was received (I could not
> accept any significant latency).
>
> I took a 2-prong approach to fix my problem. Firstly, when I am in a
> routine that knows how many bytes to expect I go into a tight loop and
> receive that number of bytes. Secondly, when I am not sure when to
> expect incoming data, I hook the Windows Application_Idle event and I
> poll the serial port to see if it found any data. This polling gives me
> immediate notification without delay, but the Application_Idle event
> doesn't occur often enough to let me stream data at 115K baud, so that's
> why I combined both approaches. Another advantage of this approach is
> that it freed me from the threading concern of having to marshal over
> the data from a background event over to the GUI thread (not difficult,
> but still a little bit of a pain).
>
> You can see my Windows application here (a visual debugger for
> microcontrollers):
> http://www.EricEngler.com/Pluto.aspx
>
> Mono serial events (when implemented) might not share this Windows XP
> problem, especially when running on linux, but if you need one
> application to work on both environments this is something to consider.
>
> Eric
>
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-- 
Dries Naudts
IBCN - IBBT - Universiteit Gent
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