Some general questions on Plugins

[ballendo]

John, Art,

I think it will ultimately depend upon whether there ARE many multiple identical DLL's in use at any given time.

If not, then separate naming will be fine.

However, I still think asking a user to DO this naming is asking for trouble over the long haul of mach3 life.

Please consider what happens as the DLL concept matures... When there are thousands to choose from.

More importantly, consider what happens as Mach becomes wider used by less "involved" operators.

I'd just like to see the potential disarray of ten thousand different named Dll's(993 of which are not being used, but still floating around the directory structure of my customer's computer) considered up front. Software design says always to consider borderline cases. the zero and infinite. please Consider "overflow".

(BTW, in this hypothetical example that user added them cuz he read that doing so would help him do something wonderful. Now I'm trying to help him get rid of the ones he didn't need, and dealing with the fact that he added some typo's when he re-named them... and perhaps those typo's now have two different and separate dll's named identically.) 

"Send me your list of DLL's" is not gonna cut it...

So perhaps my quest is more towards dealing with getting dll's into and OUT of a given user's directory structure.

(similarly: I dislike not knowing whether I can delete a given bitmap or not, since I can't remember which screen it goes with...)

Whatever you do, please give us a good means to MANAGE these DLL's in relation to multiple profiles. With unsophisticated users. Or sophisticated ones who've made misteaks...   

Ballendo

 

[ART]

B:

 Im not suggesting they rename DLL's. A dll should be named by its inventor. All a user shoudl have to do is doubleclick it when it downloads and have it autoinstall. From there, it should never be necessary to delete one, it can be simply turned off if they dont want it. I dont think muliple instance DLLs will be a norm, a simple dll will do the job for 99% of things. But I think its too early to tell. By the time I get a ModIO , and a DL5/6 dll out in the next 2-3 weeks, then we'll start to see what the issues are if any..

  Its all too new to say as yet..

Art

[jemmyell]

Hi Art,

I am writing a plugin to control Mach3 from a VBA application.  It will need to load GCODE, monitor DRO's and other UI items.  Having the aforementioned CallPlug() for asynchronous notification of UI events would be just the thing.  It would be great if it would make available the same OEM button codes that are used in DoButton() to push the buttons.  I have my prototype plugin running now.  The architecture is two threads, one for UDP communications with the VBA app and one for Mach3 command / control.  Both threads use queues to communicate.  I.E. in the CallPlug() callback all I would do is put a message onto my processing queue (struct onto a linked list) making note that a button event occurred.  I would then immediately return control to Mach3 so as to not burden the main thread at all.

Do you think this would be possible?

-James Leonard