Reads a number of characters from the System.IO.Ports.SerialPort input buffer and writes them into an array of characters at a given offset.
The number of characters read.
Use this method for reading characters from the serial port.
If it is necessary to switch between reading text and reading binary data from the stream, select a protocol that carefully defines the boundary between text and binary data, such as manually reading bytes and decoding the data.
Because the System.IO.Ports.SerialPort class buffers data, and the stream contained in the SerialPort.BaseStream property does not, the two might conflict about how many characters are available to read. The SerialPort.BytesToRead property can indicate that there are characters to read, but these characters might not be accessible to the stream contained in the SerialPort.BaseStream property because they have been buffered to the System.IO.Ports.SerialPort class.
The SerialPort.Read(Char[], int, int) method does not block other operations when the number of bytes read equals count but there are still unread bytes available on the serial port.