What is the correct way to read a serial port using .NET framework?

Question

I\'ve read a lot of questions here about how to read data from serial ports using the .NET SerialPort class but none of the recommanded approaches have proven completely eff

Answer 1

I used similar code to @MethodMan but I had to keep track of the data the serial port was sending and look for a terminating character to know when the serial port was done sending data.

private string buffer { get; set; }
private SerialPort _port { get; set; }

public Port() 
{
    _port = new SerialPort();
    _port.DataReceived += new SerialDataReceivedEventHandler(dataReceived);
    buffer = string.Empty;
}

private void dataReceived(object sender, SerialDataReceivedEventArgs e)
{    
    buffer += _port.ReadExisting();

    //test for termination character in buffer
    if (buffer.Contains("\r\n"))
    {
        //run code on data received from serial port
    }
}