So yeah, this is my new blog showcasing technology and programming, so that Jenny doesn't have to read all that boring stuff unless she wants to. ;)
For my first post, I'm going to present a little app I've put together called SharpTerminal. As the name suggests, it's a terminal app (essentially a replacement for Hyperterminal) written in C#. It does a number of things Hyperterminal doesn't do, including a command buffer, easy entry of binary (non-printable) data, display of carriage return/line feed, etc. Oh heck, here's the ReadMe:
Features:
- View communication as either ASCII text or hexadecimal values
- Save full session transcripts in multiple formats for easy analysis
- Open previous session transcripts
- Easy entry of binary data (prepend with 0x for hex entry)
- Unlimited command history (up and down arrow in Send box)
- Show or hide connection, control line, etc events.
- Colored text for ease of distinguishing between sent and received data
- Multithreaded for responsiveness
- Prettier than Hyperterminal
Future Enhancements:
- Error Handling is not completely up to snuff. It won't crash, but it's not as pretty as it could be.
- Allow user to select encoding for "Text" mode.
- Enable DTR handshaking
- Consider allowing the intermixing of ASCII and binary?
- Add automatic crash reporting.
System Requirements:
- Microsoft .Net Framework, version 1.1. It might run against 1.0, I haven't tried.
- Internet Explorer (any version 4 or later should work AFAIK).
- One or more serial ports.
Licensing:
SharpTerminal use is not limited; you may copy it, redistribute it freely, use it in a business, install it on a rocket and shoot it to the moon, or anything else I haven't mentioned here, with the following restrictions:
- No claiming it is your own work. You must include this ReadMe.txt file, UNMODIFIED, any time you redistribute it.
- Actually, that's pretty much it. If you really need specifics, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/
Questions? Comments? Bugs? Feature Requests?
Visit http://www.randomtree.org/sharpterminal/ or e-mail code@randomtree.orgAll code, text, and images copyright 2004 Eric Means.
If it sounds like something you could use, download SharpTerminal and give it a try (the zip file is about 1.5MB)!
downloaded your program, extracted the files and when I clicked on the executable, I received an error message saying:
(In the header of the error msg) SharpTerminal.exe - Unable to Locate DLL
(In the body of the msg) The dynamic link library mscoree.dll could not be found in the specified path
C:\SharpTerminal;.;C:\WINNT\system32;C:\WINNT\system;C:\WINNT;C:\WINNT\system32;C:\WINNT;C:\WINNT\system32\Wbem;C:\Program Files\Autodesk Shared\.
Hey Kent, do you have the .Net Framework installed? If not, you will need to install it (visit http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/) -- specifically the .Net Framework 1.1 version.
If you do have the Framework installed, we might need to do more digging.
Eric,
I did not have .Net Framework installed. I installed it and the program works fine.
Is there any way to echo typing in the send box and the bottom of the window even tho the serial device I am connected to transmits only?
I would like to preface the received information with some information that clarifies it so I don't have to write notes long hand and add them later.
Kent
On the Configuration Tab, if you check Echo Sent Messages, does that do what you want? If not, maybe you could explain what you mean; I'm not sure I understand completely.