SoftElegance has successfully tested the implementation of UnifiedPOS in Microsoft POS for .NET v1.12. The issue is that the latest specification is from July 2008 and there is no official support of Visual Studio 2010 and Windows 7.
Goal:
The goal was to test does Microsoft POS for .NET v1.12 (the version from July 03, 2008) runs on Windows 7 and does it supports on .NET Framework 4 in Visual Studio 2010.
Overview
Unified Point of Service it is an architectural specification for application interfaces to point-of-service devices that are used in the retail environment. This standard, which has been in existence for several years, is both operating system-independent and language neutral and defines an architecture for application interface to retail devices and a set of retail device behaviors sufficient to support a range of POS solutions.
POS for .NET is a class library that is part of Microsoft Windows Embedded for Point of Service. The class library provides .NET applications with interface for communicating with Point of Service peripheral devices, such as bar code scanners, magnetic card readers, receipt printers, and so on. In addition, POS for .NET includes a set of programming interfaces and base classes for vendors of POS peripheral devices.
Currently, 36 different point-of-service peripheral types are supported by the standard. Developed by a joint team of retailer and industry technical experts UnifiedPOS provides a consistent and exact framework for programming point of sales devices that is platform independent and vendor neutral.
The latest UnifiedPOS specification is 1.13 was released July 15, 2009. It available for download here. The issue is that it also was before the release of .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010.
The Test
0. To successfully run the same you need to be installed:
- Windows 7;
- Visual Studio 2010.
1. The Microsoft Point of Service for .NET v1.12 (POS for .NET) available from download from here.
To run it just unzip the file and run it.
Note: you need to be the administrator or right click and do “run as Administrator”.
2. To start development you could use the PosExplorer class.
Namespace: Microsoft.PointOfService
Assembly: Microsoft.PointOfService (in microsoft.pointofservice.dll)
The PosExplorer class is used by applications to obtain a list of installed POS devices, create instances of service objects for those devices, and receive Plug and Play events when the devices are connected or disconnected from the system.
For more details about development with POS for .NET v1.12 you could ask MSDN.
In case of possibles exceptions you could read this.