Condor BusTools-1553-API

Condor Engineering, Inc. Santa Barbara, California BusTools/1553-API Visual Basic Notes ------------------------------------ All of the products supported by the BusTools/1553-API are supported under Visual Basic Version 5, 6, and VB .NET. See the file "read-VB.txt" in the readme directory for more information. Note that the Visual Basic run time installation is NOT included with the BusTools/1553-API distribution. In order to run the Visual Basic example programs, you will need the Visual Basic run time support installed. This support is normally included with the Visual Basic programming environment which can be obtained from Microsoft or one of their distributors. Working with Microsoft VB .NET ------------------------------ Introduction. A new file, BUSAPI32NET.vb, is provided to support the Microsoft VB .NET environment. This is generally similar to the BUSAPI32.TXT file used for VisualBasic 6.0, except all the data types and type definitions have changed to be compliant with the .NET framework. Using the BUSAPI32NET.vb file Many structure definitions for .NET contain Initializers which must be called before structure values are set. In addition, the .NET environment imposes restrictions on passing structures that contain multidimensional arrays of data or arrays of structures. This dictates that the structure definitions use byte arrays for embedded multi- dimensional arrays which requires a few more lines of code by the programmer. The following .NET code shows an example using API_BM_TBUF. Dim bmt As API_BM_TBUF ‘declare bmt bmt.Initialize() ‘call initilaizer Dim capture(4) As TRIGGER_DEF ‘declare ‘internal’ TRIGGER_DEF arrays Dim stop1(4) As TRIGGER_DEF capture(0).type = 3 ‘set some data capture(1).type = 4 stop1(0).type = 45 ‘set more data stop1(1).type = 566 'get address of capture in an intptr using Garbage Collector object Dim myGC As GCHandle = GCHandle.Alloc(capture, GCHandleType.Pinned Dim addrOfStruct As IntPtr addrOfStruct = myGC.AddrOfPinnedObject()‘get the address of capture 'copy capture data to bmt structure (40 is number of bytes) ' 4 * (10 bytes per TRIGGER_DEF) Marshal.Copy(addrOfStruct, bmt.capture, 0, 40) 'do the same thing for the stop1 array myGC = GCHandle.Alloc(stop1, GCHandleType.Pinned) addrOfStruct = myGC.AddrOfPinnedObject() Marshal.Copy(addrOfStruct, bmt.stop1, 0, 40) 'now the data in structure has been set 'the BusTools function can be called BusTools_BM_TriggerWrite (cardnum, bmt) 'in cases where internal multidimensional structure 'data is returned by a function, the Copy must again 'be used to get the data from the structure to the arrays Marshal.Copy(bmt.stop1, 0, addrOfStruct, 40) ============================================================================== Contact Information ============================================================================== If you have any questions or need more technical information, please contact: Condor Engineering, Inc. 101 W. Anapamu St. Santa Barbara, CA USA phone: (805) 965-8000 fax: (805) 963-9630 e-mail: support@condoreng.com Internet: http://www.condoreng.com