Visual Basic 6 vs. Visual Studio

<P style="MARGIN: 0px">I've been working with my Roboteq and Visual Studio and found the following:
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<P style="MARGIN: 0px">1. When the controller is already in RS-232 mode, no watchdog, visual studio works ok - no problem sending commands to the controller.
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<P style="MARGIN: 0px">2. However, the same commands over the COM port that work in Visual Basic 6 to get the attention of the controller (a dozen or so returns) when in R/C do not work.
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<P style="MARGIN: 0px">3. When the controller is is watchdog mode, it ignores attempts to switch out of watchdog mode via a ^00 01 &lt;cr&gt; ^FF command &lt;cr&gt; from visual studio.
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<P style="MARGIN: 0px">4. All these commands work fine in hypterminal.
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<P style="MARGIN: 0px">Any ideas on what might need to be changed? I'm using the serial port library from Scientific Components.
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<P style="MARGIN: 0px">Beware that the pin 3 input is shared between the RC ch1 and RS232 RxData. It can be connected either to a PC or a RC radio but not to both at the same time.
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<P style="MARGIN: 0px">You need to reset the controller with the %rrrrrr command for the watchdog configuration parameter to take effect

The address of the Scientific Component website is:
<P style="MARGIN: 0px"><A href="www.scientificcomponent.com" target=_blank>www.scientificcomponent.com
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<P style="MARGIN: 0px">They make a GPS system that couples very nicely with the serial port, so you can use GPS data to drive motor control.
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<P style="MARGIN: 0px">After some more experimentation I found the following effects:
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<P style="MARGIN: 0px">1. I could move the motor by program commands, if I put things into a method. I suspect what's actually happening is a delay.
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<P style="MARGIN: 0px">2. Support for this comes from the fact that if you try to write to the serial port to stop the motors, and then close the serial port in your next line of code, it doesn't work.
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<P style="MARGIN: 0px">3. Reboots via the program using %rrrrrr work, but only if you have opened the COM port and not sent it any prior commands. If I had the program drive the motors for a while, then I couldn't get the roboteq to accept the reboot. However, if I closed the port and re-opened it, I could cause the reboot (!)
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<P style="MARGIN: 0px">What is the address of the Microsoft website for their system?
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<P style="MARGIN: 0px">I tried using the generic serial port opens in .NET, but had major problems getting GPS - not easy way to detect a "trigger" character on the serial ports, which is supported by scientific component.
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<P style="MARGIN: 0px">The Scientific Component PortController website has a fully operational version available for download on their website, with some really nice coding examples - a shame not to use it!

<p style="MARGIN: 0px">Looks like TSA Technologies just posted a Visual Studio example - I'll have to check it out.</p><p style="MARGIN: 0px"> </p><p style="MARGIN: 0px">Yup, visual studio is slow, except in certain areas like its trig functions, several of which aren't available in VB 6 - makes it extremely easy to do 'great circle' calculations for gps waypoint following. Our idea (since we're up against a major deadline) is to use VB in visual studio to enforce a structured programming technique, get something working, then later on convert the modules one at a time to C++.</p><p style="MARGIN: 0px"> </p><p style="MARGIN: 0px">The scicomm controller generally give good response when you have a lot of ports (5) connected at once - they have sent me a beta of their new version to test specifically with the roboteq.</p>