Anyone good at programming in VisualBasic or something? Or know any free software that can do this?

I need to write an application that will read data from an RS232 device over the serial port and output it onto an OPC server.

The COM port settings need to be changeable, not necessarily graphically, and a prompt (maybe some characters and a terminator) needs to be sent to the device for it to make an output.

Any help or tips will be much appreciated.