I will watch this one with interest for sure. It sounds like building your own airplane when you could just buy a ticket (use existing Windows functionality). From what little I know, you're looking at API's and communicating with RS232 serial ports. I have been writing code for a few years and would not even want to attempt this because it's likely that whatever I find won't work as written (there'd be something about it that is out of date and needs to be tweaked for some version of Windows) and I'd stumble around trying to make it work. I've been there, and that even assumes I found anything remotely related to what I was looking for.
The more we hear silence, the more we begin to think about our value in this universe.
Paraphrase of Professor Brian Cox.