running mscomm control 8 times

Hi,

I had an application that accesses 8 ports ( com1-com8).
would it be possible to just insert one mscomm control but assigning it into different ports? one the design right now is i have to insert 8 times mscomm active x control in my form in order to access 8 different ports. I'm a little bit affraid because this might cause problems on windows or not. would it require bigger memory so that windows can accomodate those task efficiently? My application is a mission criticcal app.

Please advice. thanks in advance.

I would like to said that, write 8 different class to handle each Serial port activity will be better. :)

Chris,

would you mean that instantiate (create) the object 8 times? could you be more specific on this? i'm new to oop.

vikoy, yup.
That mean, you need to create 8 classes and each class consits of a form(Invisible) and a MSComm32.OCX control.
If all the data from 8 different external device is the same format, then you only need to create 1 class, else
you got to repeat to build the 8 different classes.

When, you program start, it should create 8 instance of the classes and each classes will open different Comm port
with the appropiate setting.

Will this help?