[Gpsbabel-code] Windows, COMx: x>=10, life's little lessons
Brought to you by:
robertl
From: Robert L. <rob...@us...> - 2006-04-29 02:20:23
|
This spanked me hard. Apparently I'm not the only developer on the planet that didn't know that while the first nine serial ports in Windows are "COM1:" through "COM9:", subsequent ones are named "\\.\\COM10" and so on. Oh, and if you don't strip the colon even after adding the "\\.\\", it fails in yet a different bizarre way. http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Knowledgebase/index.html?howdoiopencom10orhigher.htm About half the Windows software I tried to convince to use "com11:" failed in mysterious ways, so it was obviously a system/driver level thing and not an applicationy thing, right? Yeah, right. This cost me several hours to discover. Apparently my Windows systems is "blessed" in that it has eight of the first nine COM ports marked busy in some way so when it booted with another couple USB->serial thingies, the ones that got com #'s < 10 worked and the rest were responsible for this little education. Unless any of you can counter this tidbit, I'll have fixes for the various windows serial systems in our code base forthcoming. RJL |