I have been doing some programming with Bluetooth on the PC. I was amazed that there are at least three different Bluetooth stacks under XP. They are Toshiba, Widcom and Microsoft. Of these Microsoft seems to be the one that I would use first, and Toshiba is the last. The API’s for these stacks seems to be poorly implemented. There are some stacks available. The best (because it is free) looks like the one from 32feet.net, but the important thing is that this only works with the microsoft stack.

Of course my laptop only talks Bluetooth. So what to do? I picked up a USB Bluetooth Dongle from PressDigital, and this uses the Microsoft Bluetooth Stack under XP SP2. This is exactly what I wanted. Now I can do the programming I need to do! And the thing just worked. None of this rubbish that I have had with the Toshiba or Widcom drivers not working. This one just worked. It is good when Microsoft does things properly.