Part 1 - Serial Port via USB Made Almost Easy -- In the first section you will learn the basics of serial communications using a USB UART bridge. You will further learn to write a simple terminal program in C# and Visual Basic Express .NET.
Part 2 - PC to Microcontroller Conversations -- In the second section you will build on what you have learned and get into more details about GUI programming, using the SerialPort class, and some useful software tools such as XML. You will bring it all together by building a Developer Terminal, which will have most of the bells and whistles that you would want for communicating between a PC and a microcontroller. You will end this section with some neat hardware experiments.
Part 3 - The FTDI FT232R -- In the final section you will chuck the serial port paradigm and communicate directly with the FT232R. You will learn how to use the Smiley Micros port of the FTDI D2XX driver, you will do some more hardware experiments bit-banging the BBUSB pins, and finally you will build a software programmer for the FT232R.