>Is there an article somewhere on how to build an interface between VFP application and hardware device connected to PC via RS232?
>
>Do I need 3P tools to do that?
>
>Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

The only thing you need is to know potocol in wich you will comunicate with that device. You can do this with MSCOMM32.OCX (Microsoft Communication Control) or you can use this free class witen in C++ at http://home.ict.nl/~ramklein/Projects/Serial.html but you must write your own wraper to use it in VFP.