<p>I am working with a peripheral device that needs to be communicated through serial.  I can send it commands using HyperTerminal, but now I need to write programs that will let me do it without HyperTerminal.  Can somebody point me to a website and/or show me a sample hello world program to get me started?  I have searched through many sites which give me uncompilable/ancient VC6 code.</p>

In order to interface with the serial port, you open a file with one of the special filenames "COM1" through "COM9".  For serial ports with higher numbers, the special filename begins with \\?\, which in C/C++ code must be escaped as "\\\\?\\COM10", etc.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms810467.aspx
has a really good tutorial on using the serial port.  Note that you should use the Windows file I/O functions such as
```
CreateFile()
```
,
```
ReadFile()
```
, and
```
WriteFile()
```
.  I'm not sure if it will work to use standard I/O functions such as
```
fopen()
```
,
```
fread()
```
, and
```
fwrite()
```
.