DESIGN VIEW is the summary of the complete DESIGN SOLUTION contributed article, which begins on Page 2.
Over the years, engineers developing applications to control T&M equipment have employed a variety of languages and development environments. And it's often the comfort level of those engineers doing the programming that determines just which programming language they choose, rather than overall value, ease of use, scalability, or capabilities.
A number of individuals or groups support products through the entire product life cycle, so often companies must manage and maintain multiple, in-house built applications. This includes the various in-house experts with their numerous programming languages. Also, some 90% of all test equipment connects to a computer or a network.
It needn't be this way, though. The Microsoft Visual Studio .NET open development environment lets T&M programmers boost productivity, reduce costs, and accelerate time-to-market. With this standard, they can install, manage, and grow their environment. More importantly, those working within the .NET platform to create and test new products can focus their creativity on solutions while leveraging a well refined development platform.
This article explores the portions of the .NET platform that are most important to the daily lives of design and test engineers. Discussed are the two parts of the new .NET environment that are key to writing "Plain Old Windows Applications": the .NET Framework comprising the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and Framework Class Library (FCL), and the VS.NET development environment.
Because the .NET platform is language-neutral, all .NET languages are first-class players. Described are the languages provided by Microsoft, which include Visual Basic, C++, the brand-new component-oriented C#, and J#. There are also third parties creating .NET languages for FORTRAN, Perl, Pascal, Python, COBOL, and others.
It's expected that engineers will experience up to a 50% decrease in time spent programming instruments and displaying data by working within the .NET homebase and leveraging .NET code portability.
Full article begins on Page 2