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I'm building a website in ASP.NET with backend functionality in C#. The idea is that you can connect a device to your own serial port, then go to the website to send the received data from your serial port to the website.

I made a simple page which can access a serial port but after some thinking I realized I was only accessing the serial port of the computer the server runs on. I'm sure I'll be able to solve this by using two seperate applications, a client and a server. The client will then send the received data through TCP to the server. The problem is that I don't want two seperate applications, I want only one application, the website.

I'm not sure if this is possible, so my question is: Is this possible and how can it be done? Thanks in advance!

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The only way you could do it is to build a custom browser plug-in, such as an ActiveX control. But, that limits you to using Internet Explorer. Even then, i think IE now has too many protections to allow it so people running Vista or Windows 7 would not be able to run your control without disabling browser security.

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Only using IE shouldn't be a big problem, the application is focussed on Microsoft products. But if I understand you correctly, I might not be able to use ActiveX in Win7? Or do I need to manually "accept" the component?
@Carlito - IE8 and above, running on Vista and 7 run in "low rights" or "protected" mode. This is a sandbox that denys the browser and it's plugins access to the system. The only way around it is to disable protected mode, which puts your system at risk of drive-by malware.
And are there any other browser plugins, besides ActiveX, that you know of that can handle this?
@Carlito - Not for IE. Firefox has native plugins, but these will be much more difficult to build. Honestly, i'd just give up on this idea, you will waste a lot of time.
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No, it's not possible, since the browser cannot access serial devices connected to the PC (and that's a good thing).

One workaround would be to create a browser plugin which does have the rights to access the serial device, but then, again, you'd have two applications.

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