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Name: Florin Vancea

Serial Port Monitor ActiveX

• industry: software development
• location: Romania
• representative: Florin Vancea, freelance software developer
• gifts from Eltima: Free OEM License for Serial Port Monitor ActiveX

Victoria Veligodsky: What obstacles did you face that made you searching for this kind of software product?

Florin Vancea: I needed an embedded serial monitor that will fit into my own application. I am developing an application which communicates via serial ports with different devices (produced by different companies). The communication protocol is pretty standard, and I needed a tool to log the communication events of the port for my debugging purposes.

Victoria Veligodsky: In which way you looked for the solution? How did you find Serial Port Monitor ActiveX?

Florin Vancea: I found out about Eltima's Serial Port Monitor ActiveX by searching the google web site for a serial communication monitor control.

Victoria Veligodsky: Why did you prefer our product? Did you try products by other Software Producers before choosing our solution?

Florin Vancea: I have downloaded trials from some software producers, and yours was the one that seemed to be good enough for what I needed, as well as it was good documented. There were several different software products that also fit into my search, but some of them had undocumented methods and properties, and some of them were not real controls but something that looked like 3rd party applications that could have been distributed for logging. Also one extra point for you was the chance to earn the free license by completing the case study.

Victoria Veligodsky: Thank you Florin for such a detailed answer. And for which purposes you are using our product now?

Florin Vancea: Since I downloaded it, I found it to work the way I needed for my application, since the log it generates looks OK (the nag screen is pissing me off, but it is still a good, fully working trial). Even if much of the methods are standard ones, as I said before, the documentation is very good and makes the difference. I haven't tried yet to embed the control into my app, but I have run the two applications in parallel and generated the log file from the example application that was included into the download. I was glad to find out that I succeeded in using the control from my application today.

Victoria Veligodsky: In what ways did you succeed using Serial Port Monitor ActiveX?

Florin Vancea: If I succeed using your activeX control, I will have a handy debug tool embedded into my application to see if there are protocol errors in my device, or serial port problems. [Victoria: Florin did succeed in embedding our Serial Port Monitor ActiveX in the application of his own and now he has a very useful tool for debugging. The tool is embedded into his own application and lets him test and monitor serial ports.]