Put data on active window

Hello all,

I want to receive data from the paralell port and to put it on whatever window is active at the moment, it could be notepad, word, excel, is this easy with the API functions? which should I look for?

XVB

I'm sorry I can't help much on VB, but I can tell you conceptually what must be done, since I've done this kind of thing in C.

The parallel port, being a legacy device, is not virtualized. Only one application at a time can "own" it. You may decide to use a COM port, as they can be virtualized. Anyway, you need to get ownership of the parallel port. And you will need to provide a means for Basic to talk to the port.

To do this, you need a DLL that you can input and output from VB. They are available in shareware.

To put data into each kind of window will need that window's handle and its method of handling data. I suggest you put the data on the clipboard then use the clipboard functions to show the data in each window, since that is a relatively well-supported application interface. See the Microsoft SDK's sample code CLIPTXT.C for how to handle the clipboard. Sorry it's not Basic.

Good Luck