RedRatCom v1.11

Welcome to RedRatCom, a simple COM based library which can be used to support the "RedRat2" Infra-red communications transmitter / receiver. RedRatCom is a standard COM EXE developed in ATL in Visual Studio 2005 SP1.

Features

• Can be used by any development environment which supports calling an out of process COM object.
• Can be used by early or late bound clients i.e. COM development environments which do not use type libraries such as ASP, VBScript and JScript are fully compatible with RedRatCom.
• Allows connections to RedRat devices to be shared between multiple clients i.e. multiple client processes can share the one connection to the device's serial port !!.
• A COM collection is provided to allow clients to enumerate existing connections which they can then connect to. This allows VB clients for example to use the "For Each" collection syntax.
• Alternatively, clients can open up a new connection and specify that the connection is not to be made sharable.
• COM Connection points are provided in the library to allow client apps to be notified in real time of incoming signals.

Copyright

• You are allowed to include the source code in any product (commercial, shareware, freeware or otherwise) when your product is released in binary form.
• You are allowed to modify the source code in any way you want except you cannot modify the copyright details at the top of each module.
• If you want to distribute source code with your application, then you are only allowed to distribute versions released by the author. This is to maintain a single distribution point for the source code.

History

V1.0 (1 January 2003)

• Initial public release.

V1.1 (10 January 2003)

• COM errors from the library now include english descriptions of the errors if possible. The error codes are documented at www.dodgies.demon.co.uk/SoftDev/SD_errorcodes.html.

13 March 2003

• Minor update to the documentation and the sample VB program.

V1.11 (24 January 2006)

• Updated documentation to use the same style as the web site.
• Code is now built and delivered using VC 2005 SP1.
• Now uses v1.21 of the author's CSerialPort class.
• Complete review of the code in light of use of ATL8.
• The IConnectionPointImplMT class which RedRatCom makes use of internally is being made available as freeware.

Installation & Redistribution

The RedRat EXE is a standard self-registering COM EXE so registration / unregistration is handled using the "/RegServer" or "/UnRegServer" command line parameters.

When it comes time to distribute your applications you will need to ship "RedRat.exe" and the MFC runtime DLL "MFC42.dll" which it depends on (assuming you are using the ASCII Release build which is included prebuilt in the download). 

The RedRat EXE is a standard self-registering COM EXE so registration / un-registration is handled using the "/RegServer" or "/UnRegServer" command line parameters. If you are using a MSI based installer, then the recommended way to register the component is to avoid self registration and instead extract the registration details into the MSI tables.

The zip file comes with a ready to ship Unicode Release of RedRatCom in the "Unicode Release" directory which will work on Windows NT 4 or later.

When it comes time to distribute your applications you will need to ship "RedRat.exe" and the VC 2005 SP1 runtimes. If you are using the VS 2005 BootStrapper then you can use the standard vcredist_x86 or vcredist_x64 prerequisites. 

Usage

To start developing client applications using RedRatCom, all you need to do is pull in the RedRatCom library using whatever support your development environment provides for using COM objects. Please note that internally the code makes use of a COM mechanism called the "Global Interface Table" which is only available on Windows NT SP 3 or later or Windows 95 (or later) with DCOM version 1.1 or later installed.

To create a connection to a RedRat2/3 device you can use the RedRatConnections class which provides a standard COM collection of all the existing RedRatConnections currently created. Alternatively use the RedRatPort::CreateConnection method to create a new connection.

Once you have a RedRatConnection object you can call various the methods and properties provided by that class.

Included with the download is a very simple VB app which exercises all of the functionality of the library. You should be able to get an idea on how to use the library by examining the code in this sample.

Planned Enhancements

• Remove dependency of RedRatCom library upon MFC.
• If you have any other suggested improvements for RedRatCom, please let me know so that I can incorporate them into the next release of RedRatCom.

Contacting the Author

PJ Naughter
Email: pjna@naughter.com
Web: http://www.naughter.com
24 January 2006