Entries for the 'MS Visual Studio/.NET' Category

 As many of you may know, we used last week’s Oktoberfest party as an unofficial house warming party for our new office space. In addition to having a great turnout despite uncooperative weather, the Kinect Demo team from FedEx Day 2010 put in some extra hours to get our new display case setup to welcome guests. If you haven’t seen the display case, an early video is available here,... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Recently DMC developed a high speed vision inspection system using LabVIEW. This system inspects many different parts and each part requires different inspection criteria, so we needed to develop a user interface (UI) that could be used to configure the current products, as well as be flexible enough to configure new products. The manufacturing machine was already running on a Windows CE device... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Our first experience with the .NET Micro Framework (NETMF) was on GHI Electronic's Embedded Master platform, using the .NET Micro Framework 3.0.  We recently had an opportunity to use the GHI's next generation replacement for the Embedded Master, the EMX module, and the .NET Micro Framework 4.1.  Both Microsoft and GHI have made many changes to the assemblies, classes and methods.  ... [Read the rest of this blog...]

WCF web services can be integrated into LabVIEW but is not as easy as you might hope.

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It is often desired to have "occasionally connected" applications where a device may not always be connected to a network and that makes the task of maintaining a central data store such as SQL Server 2008R2 consistent across multiple devices and users an extremely challenging task.  Fortunately, Microsoft has created Microsoft Sync Services (sync services) to address... [Read the rest of this blog...]

When, besides in children’s cartoons (and my Christmas blogs), do you ever get to see robots dancing? At the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry! This past week I had another opportunity to check out cutting edge robotics at the museum. This event was showcasing Aldebaran Robotics’ Nao (pronounced “Now”) Robot, a top notch humanoid robot companion. Not only is this robot the star of th... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Source Code Control (SCC) is universally acknowledged by developers as an important part of developing and maintaining projects.  Effective use of takes discipline because what is not checked into the repository is not saved.  Opening a project several years after the fact to find out that the latest code resided on a long decommissioned computer is not a pleasant experience.  ... [Read the rest of this blog...]

I recently had the experience of working on a Visual Basic.NET 1.1 application that our company created a number of years ago.  This brought the whole issue of maintaining legacy code into sharp focus.  Legacy industrial software could easily take up several blog entries on its own so we will focus specifically on Visual Basic 6 and .NET (Visual Basic.NET or C#). For a blog entry on wor... [Read the rest of this blog...]

I recently developed a 3D void detection prototype system for the packaging industry. The system will measure the empty volume inside of a box filled with contents. Once this volume is known, a subsequent system can optimize the number of packing peanuts required to fill up the box. By using this system, the filling of boxes with packing peanuts can be automated. The Hardware and Software u... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Recently I was working on a project using several threads in C#. I had four threads; one for the Main UI, one for serial communication with some force sensors, one operating a motion controller, and the final one used to perform user defined scripts. When using multiple threads it is important to control the method of information transfer between threads. Although some older softwar... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) To help explain why one would choose Silverlight for application development, I think it’s important to have a basic understanding of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).  Silverlight is one of a small handful of RIA software frameworks that are used to build interactive web applications for internal enterprise applications and public-facing Internet si... [Read the rest of this blog...]

This article presents the basics of Web Part development (with and without Silverlight) along with solutions for 2 common "gotcha's" for new developers.

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32-bit applications have been around for a long time while 64-bit operating systems are only recently gaining popularity. Therefore, I would expect that the 64-bit OS successors would make it easy to run legacy 32-bit apps. And, they do as long as you compile them correctly.[Read this blog...]

While it is usually preferable to avoid mixing development environments for a project, sometimes we need to create a mixed platform solution.  In a recent project, I needed to create a class library in C# to interact with a LabVIEW 2009 SP1 application. I fired up Visual Studio 2010 and created a quick .Net 4 application.  On attempting to create a constructor in LabVIEW, I got the erro... [Read the rest of this blog...]

 In an ideal world, a design project has well defined phases with appropriate time alloted for each milestone.  In the real world, clients often bring a project that is already behind schedule, needing results yesterday.  Board design can be a cumbersome process, often taking weeks before something physical is ready for the end customer.  Breadboarding is an option, but it ofte... [Read the rest of this blog...]

I had a customer that wanted a Business Intelligence SharePoint web-part to track their facebook fans over time, to measure the effectiveness of their Facebook marketing push. Little did I suspect that I would be a casualty in the wars over database scalability. I was excited because I'd heard great things about the active Facebook developer community, and found that the Facebook Query ... [Read the rest of this blog...]

DMC has recently developed a set of versatile, powerful, time-saving, and customizable web parts to utilize in our SharePoint dashboard solutions.  These tools provide a huge array of ways to visualize data and KPI's critical to a company's operation in a way that is simple and easy to interpret.   Here are some of the major benefits of this new web part architecture:   ... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Recently I worked on a project where I needed to import test data from a chemical process contained in text files into a MS SQL Server database. I was about to start a C# .NET project to do this task, but I thought there has to be a quicker and easier way to do this. That is how I stumbled upon SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). SSIS can do exactly what I needed. This tool is a component incl... [Read the rest of this blog...]

The message box, in Windows Forms and WPF, is a useful, quick-and-dirty way to send an alert, display an error, and get simple input from the user.  The message box is, however, modal.

This blog article discusses using asynchronous programming to create a message box that will not block the calling thread.

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Recently, I created a function to execute this simple flowchart: This function is executing within its own thread and starts an asynchronous action that executes in another thread.  This function periodically checks the system state.  Before the asynchronous action is started, an initialization action must occur.  After it is started, if the system state changes to Pause, the asy... [Read the rest of this blog...]