I dont know what is going on with WestNet, but things have not improved at all. I am beginning to think that the capping is still in place, but that they have not added their MyAccounts site to the list of free sites. OOps. Being the first of the month any limits should have been removed, but that does not seem to be the case. Hmm. Time for a phone call I suspect.

With VisualStudio 2005 comes the version 2.0 of the .NET framework (pronounced ‘Dot Net’). This has an important feature that Microsoft really did not want to put in, but pressure from the developer community demanded… That is the serial port control. This is now found under the System.IO.Ports.Serial class, and allows me to program the serial port without any of the bother of using a third party library. In fact I think this code is FAR better than the third party one I purchased in the past. The code actually works.

Since the serial port runs in another thread, I needed to use the normal InvokeRequired trick to actually do much with the code. This was a very quick thing to implement, requiring about seven lines of code, of which most are a straight copy from existing code. So easy!

I found the protocol used by my new Multimeter. The cryptic one page document describing the protocol is available here.