Development environment

Overview

This section presents an overview of the development environment used to create PC SDK applications. The application has to be programmed and debugged using Microsoft Visual Studio.

Microsoft .NET and Microsoft Visual Studio

Microsoft Visual Studio is supported by the .NET Framework. A core component of the .NET Framework is the common language runtime (CLR). It manages code execution, threads and memory, while also enforcing type safety.

Another major component is the Base Class Library, which is a comprehensive, object-oriented collection of reusable types. To become a skilled .NET programmer it is essential to learn the functionality offered by the Base Class Library.

It is not in the scope of this manual to teach how to use Visual Studio. For this purpose Microsoft Learn is a useful source of information.

Choosing a programming language

Together with Visual Basic, C# is the most widely used .NET language.

C# is an object-oriented language derived from C, with some features from C++, Java and Visual Basic. It was designed for .NET and offers the power and richness of C++ along with the productivity of Visual Basic. Both PC and FlexPendant SDK are implemented using C#.

For PC SDK applications any of the .NET languages can be used. ABB support, however, is offered only in C# and Visual Basic.NET. Likewise, in this manual there are code samples in C#, but none in J# or Visual C++.

At run-time it does not matter which language you have used, as compiled .NET code is language independent. The source code compiles from a high-level language into Intermediate Language (IL), which is then executed, at runtime, by the Common Language Runtime. This makes it possible to use different programming languages, even within the same application. For more information on .NET terms, see Definitions.

Note

It is presumed that you are already a .NET programmer. If not, you need to start by learning the programming language to be used. There are numerous books teaching C# and Visual Basic.

Integration with Visual Studio

PC application uses the standard design support. As you will see, using PC SDK is quite intuitive for a developer used to Visual Studio programming.

Note

Refer PC SDK API reference for more details.

The Reference Manual PC SDK can also be located at installation directory. We recommend you to keep the help file open while programming, as you will frequently need them for PC SDK related issues.