Peek and ReadToEnd are methods that might appear useful but in reality aren??™t
practical for most COM-port applications.
Peek returns the next value in the stream without removing the value from the
stream or returns -1 if no character is available. The method can be useful when
reading from resources such as files but is less helpful in COM-port applications
that send data continuously. When the buffer is empty, Peek returns -1
but then continues to return -1 even after more characters have arrived at the
port.
ReadToEnd returns a String containing everything from the current position to
the end of the stream. The stream normally has no way of knowing when it has
reached the end of a particular block of COM-port data. (When reading from a
StreamWriter object, ReadToEnd returns when the StreamWriter object closes.)
Users often find it convenient when an application remembers and selects the
port used the last time the application ran. One way to save parameters is to
store them in the system registry using the RegistryKey class in the
Microsoft.Win32 namespace. The .NET Framework provides another option
in the Application Settings architecture, which enables storing and retrieving
settings in files that don??™t clog the registry.
1
The System.Configuration namespace includes the AppSettingsSection class,
which provides the Settings property for saving and retrieving settings.
Pages:
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221