PowerTCP Emulation for .NET enables the development of applications in .NET that can communicate with legacy applications or any server that supports VT-52, VT-100, VT-220 and VT-320 terminals. The Vt control is a powerful terminal emulator that enables a developer to build custom terminal emulation applications from within .NET. Built-in Telnet capability, built using the PowerTCP Telnet for .NET component, enables the Vt control to start a session with as little as one line of code. Also included is a custom font for support of VT graphics characters, a FontDialog control that displays all fixed width raster and True-Type fonts, the ability to interrogate every cell for comprehensive style information, full Unicode support, and powerful printing capability.

Background:
The vast array of legacy servers and mainframes that house valuable corporate information still requires application developers to create interfaces that enable end-users to access that data in a usable fashion. Whether that approach involves automating a screen-scraping from a report, or creating a custom application that can communicate as a virtual terminal, modern .NET developers require tools that can enable such communications.

Technical Solution:
PowerTCP Emulation comes with all the tools a .NET developer will require to build an application that can communicate with a backend database or UNIX application. The Vt control enables the interpretation and display of escape sequences, the custom FontDialog control allows for the manipulation of a specialized font that includes VT-specific graphic characters, and the Telnet, rsh, rlogin, and rexec components allow for communicating to the actual machines.

Technical Innovation:
The Vt control is one of the few alternatives for .NET when display of VT-52, VT-100, VT-220, and VT-320 is required. The control interprets the escape sequences and using a custom font will display not only the characters, but also the stylistic information for a particular screen location. Unicode character generation and display is fully supported. When automation is required, every cell on the screen can be interrogated for text and stylistic information, plus data can also be returned as HTML. The Vt control supports many common VT characteristics such as advanced printing options, scroll-back buffering, and numerous Telnet options. Telnet capability is available as both a built-in option, or as an external component.

Usage Scenarios
Customers will typically develop an interactive .NET application that communicates with a back-end UNIX or mainframe server that leverages the servers support for virtual terminals. When automation is required, an application will use a script to login to a server and perform a series of actions that result in reports that can be screen scraped and presented on the client-side.

Details: