Debug/Reverse Engineer Serial Port & VB Program?

This definitely belongs in this forum because it's not empeg related, but would someone with Mod access be kind enough to add linking messages to the Programming and Technical forums? It looks like there are quite a number of people that don't pop into OffTopic who i think may have a suggestion or two.

Anyway, I have a small serial port IR receiver and a VB program (Windows XP - came with the serial hardware) that listens to it and displays some info about what it reads from the HW. I would like to snoop all the signals on that COM port while the software is working in hopes of finding out exactly how to initialize the hardware and what it spits back when functioning.

Basically the software is limited in what it presents in its UI and I'd like to do something on my own - it'll also be the first steps in making this thing work on the Mac (which will further require a USB/serial adapter).

I've seen a lot of serial port projects being talked about here over the years and I know plenty of people have quite a bit of experience with this sort of thing. I have a full installation of Visual Studio .NET at work if any of the included tools will be relevant. Other than that I'll simply have to get whatever other tools are recommended.

Thanks.
Bruno

Quote:
I would like to snoop all the signals on that COM port while the software is working in hopes of finding out exactly how to initialize the hardware and what it spits back when functioning.

This is precisely what I did to fix most of the port initialization bugs in the win32 version of UPLOAD.EXE for my logo editor. The serial port snooper program I used for that is now one of my "must have" utilities.

The utility you want is portmon.

Ah, good old sysinternals.