Basic Serial Communication (Writing)

Hello,

I am a student and am working for a company over the summer. I am very new to C and and writing on an XP machine.

Basically, I was wondering if anyone could help me understand how to write to a comm port. I am trying to write simple strings across COM4 with the following configuration:
Baud:4800
Parity: none
Data bits: 8
Stop bits: 1

I was just wondering how I could send a specified string across the specified COM port with the least amount of code.

In the end I want to be able to send a string once every second through COM4.

Any help or code would be great, I am very new to C (started with java) and I really would like to learn how to do this. Thanks for everything in advance.

-DUG

There's an article by Robertson Bayer that covers the basics of Win32 serial port programming in C. The link is http://www.robbayer.com/files/serial-win.pdf . This should be a good starting point.