{"id":220,"date":"2012-03-28T16:34:04","date_gmt":"2012-03-28T20:34:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/templesystems.com\/?page_id=220"},"modified":"2012-04-06T07:32:19","modified_gmt":"2012-04-06T11:32:19","slug":"development-tools","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/templesystems.com\/?page_id=220","title":{"rendered":"Development Tools"},"content":{"rendered":"

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One of the advantages of using a PC as a control is the availability of high quality development tools. Microsoft Visual Studio is the standard programming environment for creating software to run on the Microsoft Windows operating system. \u00a0I consider Visual Studio to be a world class development environment.<\/p>\n

While some industrial control programming software packages are impressive, it is just not practical for control vendors to compete with Microsoft on development software. \u00a0Microsoft’s user base justifies the development time required to produce a product like Visual Studio. \u00a0Also, Microsoft uses Visual Studio for much of their own software development, so they have internal interest in quality of it. \u00a0Programming software is an aside to industrial control manufacturers. \u00a0It is a necessary evil that they must provide to allow the end user to program their hardware. \u00a0Most industrial control development environments are rough around the edges. Some are pretty good, but most are just usable at best. \u00a0They tend to be quirky and feel thrown together. \u00a0I will say that they have improved over the years, but there is no way that a typical control vendor can expend the resources needed to create programming tools that are of the same quality as a company like Microsoft, whose business is software.<\/p>\n

In the Linux and “open source” world there are development programs such as Eclipse. \u00a0Eclipse is gaining acceptance in a number of areas. \u00a0Some microcontroller manufacturers are leveraging the Eclipse development by making their own plug-ins or extensions to Eclipse so that developers can use it to write code for their microcontrollers. \u00a0Eclipse seems to be a strong environment, but I don’t think it compares favorably to Visual Studio, especially with respect to speed. \u00a0I think that Eclipse uses the Java runtime engine. \u00a0This seems to make it very slow. \u00a0There may be ways to get it to run better, but every time I have tried Eclipse it has been a disappointment. \u00a0I most recently used it to work on TI Microcontrollers, and it seemed barely adequate. \u00a0Perhaps really strong hardware would help.<\/p>\n

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One of the advantages of using a PC as a control is the availability of high quality development tools. Microsoft Visual Studio is the standard programming environment for creating software to run on the Microsoft Windows operating system. \u00a0I consider … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":216,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-220","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/templesystems.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/templesystems.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/templesystems.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/templesystems.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/templesystems.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=220"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/templesystems.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":222,"href":"https:\/\/templesystems.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/220\/revisions\/222"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/templesystems.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/templesystems.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}