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Over the years, engineers engaged in developing applications to control test and measurement (T&M) equipment used a variety of languages and development environments. Often, it is the comfort level of engineers doing the programming that determines which programming language they choose -- rather than overall value, productivity, ease of use, scalability or capabilities.
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Adapting the Visual Studio.NET environment as a standard could enable programmers to work with an open software standard when installing, managing and growing their environment. There are additional tools that can help them solve specific problems, while remaining in the open software standard environment. The following is an explanation of the.NET platform:
In a nutshell
Two major parts of the new.NET platform are important to writing Windows-based applications. The first is the.NET Framework comprising the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and the Framework Class Library (FCL), and the second is the Visual Studio.NET development environment. (See figure 1).
The Common Language Runtime (CLR) is a runtime that is usable by all the different.NET programming languages. It is designed to simplify development and is object oriented, which means that classes and inheritance are fully supported -- even across languages. A class written in VB.NET can be inherited from it in another language such as Managed C++ or C# and vice-versa.
One of the new features of the CLR is that all.NET objects are garbage collected. Programmers will not have to deal with stray pointers, memory leaks and missing object releases. This has traditionally been time-consuming for software development teams and is the source of many defects.
Design Goals
The second main part of the.NET Framework is the Framework Class Library (FCL). This library is a large set of new classes,...