>I am beginning a project to track inventory and want to use barcoding. Can someone direct me to the best way to generate barcoded documents how to establish the communications with a barcode scanner. I presume there are libraries, etc., but I have not attempted this previously. Thanks in advance.

The reader is the easy part. You won't need to do anything to establish communications with a reader, whether keyboard or hand scanner, since that'll be handled by the reader when it's installed. From your application's point-of-view it's just another input device, and will seem like a really fast keyboard typist, as someone else here pointed out.

Printing barcodes is not as easy as it's made out to be, IMO. While there are barcode fonts that you apply to text to print a barcode, it's not necessarily a simple matter. First, most barcode fonts cost money and have redistribution royalties. There are many choices, the vendor I've used is KaneCal. Do make sure that whatever font you use is high quality. If it's poor quality, the resolution won't be adequate to get reliable reads.

If you need adustable sizing of the fonts, you'll need to consider the font vendor also. For example, I use www.kanecal.net because they provide a variety of height choices which allow me to print very customized, high quality sized barcodes. They're costs were very reasonable, and their customer support excellent. (Checking their site I see their prices have gone up by quite a bit.)

The other piece is getting between the text you store and what text is printed thru the font to get to the barcode representation of the text. It's not a one-to-one relationship. I found there was a tradeoff between how much work up front I had to do (which really wasn't bad) and the cost of the font. Some fonts, such as Adobe, come with more support, such as activeX controls.

Going through an external label program wasn't an option for my customer...in fact they used to do that, but it limited them in how easy it was to add new barcode-related features in their app.

I presume you'll use Code 39. However, which code you use depends on how much you want to store in the code. 39 is common, I believe, for inventory management in the U.S.

Some references I've found useful:
http://www.barcodeisland.com/symbolgy.phtml
http://shop.store.yahoo.com/imteclabels/whichbarcode.html