few questions concerning usb barcode scanner

Question

this is probably an old question, but I've read through articles about usb barcode scanner and still can't make my mind about how to use it.

I'm using an USB barcode scanner, and to my understanding there are two methods to use it - as keyboard wedge and serial port.

correct me if i'm wrong, but serial port might be easier to use (because there is an distinction between the scanner's input and the keyboard's) but you must hold info about the port, which might be problematic since I can't tell which port the scanner will get on clients' computers. Is that correct?

Second question- if I will go with the keyboard wedge option, I need to tell the scanner's input from the keyboard's. In that case I need to focus on a textbox, and know when the scanner's input begins and ends. There is an option to configure the scanner to send special character at the start/end of the stream. If I don't have control over the client's scanner type and configuration, how can I tell that the specific input is the scanner's?

Thanks ahead

Answer 1

If you have a serial (RS-232) scanner you have to configure in which port number your program listen , usually through the serial port you have some advanced command that you can send to the scanner for enable or disable reading, and so on ...

A Scanner connected through USB can be configured in wedge mode and you have to autofocus on the textBox that you want to fill, optionally some model of scanner can be configured for reading barcode with a prefix or/and a suffix char. It depends on your scanner model .

Answer 2

Have you considered Microsoft POS for .Net? The framework allows you to subscribe to events in C# and then you don't have to worry about setting focus on TextBoxes or the user clicking whilst scanning, etc. The scanner to be set to IBM-USB and (I think) has to support "Control Objects" to use it with the POS for .Net stuff. An example of one that works well is a Datalogic QuickScan 6500.