TCP/IP/PPP connection using a direct serial port in Vista

Hi there,

I have a question regarding how to establish a direct serial port
connection
that uses TCP/IP in Windows Vista.

We have a hardware device which connects to the PC's serial port using
a
null-modem cable. We can communicate with the device using TCP/IP.

In Windows XP SP2 we do this by creating a RAS phonebook entry (using
RasSetEntryProperties) and setting the type to direct (RASENTRY-
>dwType =
RASET_Direct) and the device type to serial (
_tcscpy_s(RASENTRY->szDeviceType, RASDT_Serial) ).

Once we create this entry, we do a RasDial() to establish the
connection.
Next, we use RasGetProjectionInfo() to get the PPP information about
the IP
endpoints for client and server.

Using the IP endpoints we create a TcpClient (.NET class) instance
where we
can use the stream to start our communication to the hardware device
on the
other end of the serial connection.

In Windows Vista (last beta from MSDN) a direct RAS phonebook entry is
no
longer supported (#define ERROR_FEATURE_DEPRECATED (RASBASE+216) ) so
we
can't establish our RAS connection and can't get the PPP info and
can't get
our TCP stream going.

Since a direct RAS phonebook entry is no longer supported in Vista,
what has
replaced it?

Is there a different way that we should be establishing a TCP/IP/PPP
connection with a device attached to a serial port?

I have played around with the SerialPort class in .NET, which does
establish
a connection, but we need to use TCP to communicate with the device
and I
don't know how to wrap the SerialPort stream with a TcpClient stream.

We are using .NET 2.0 (VS2005) with C#, managed C++ and the Win32 API
as our
environment.

Thanks,
- Josh

Josh, you saw my earlier appends (11Jan2007 and 15Jan2007) under
"816=RasSetEntryProperties() on Vista" ? In my case it was SLIP,
while you mention PPP -- is yours actually PPP ? In any event, per
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa377274.aspx (RASENTRY) at
dwType:
RASET_Direct for Direct serial or parallel connection is no longer
used on Vista.

I have found no other solution beyond non-support of Vista .

Jon