On Wed, Aug 04, 1999 at 02:42:10PM -0700, Anne Ogborn wrote:

> 4. some way to interface a program to create a stimulus file on the fly.
> Incorporating Visual Basic would be easy. Listening at a TCP/IP
> socket would be quite general. ODBC would be perverse but would
> work - CORBA?? RMI??? ActiveX???  Something??????

Writing it in real Win32 code would be a start at
improving the product for the Windows platform,
although my preferance would be for them to go
in the opposite direction and write totally
portable code that could someday wind up on a
Unix or Linux platform. Cadsoft, for example,
is going to use the Qt GUI for the next version
of Eagle, which will help keep the product
cross-platform. It isn't clear to me that
uChip cares about this sort of thing, however.

To include VBA would require a reasonably hefty
ISV license fee payable to M$, I believe, and
could potentially threaten the free status of
MPLAB. CORBA is more likely in that it is possible
to implement the CORBA architecture without
paying through the nose, in fact there are several
free implementations available (although I don't
know how many of them are available for Windows).

Were they to take the CORBA route (not that I'm
holding my breath) it would be incredibly cool
if they were to work with Scott D. et. al. to
come up with a unified interface that would
allow stimulus generators that could be used with
either the Microchip or the gpsim simulators. I
mean, it isn't like Microchip makes any money
off of Mplab that wouldn't also be made off an
alternative IDE. Daydreaming, however, is
way too easy.

BTW, as for the help file being less than helpful,
there is also a full (250 page) manual for MPLAB,
that AFAIK doesn't come with the MPLAB download:

http://www.microchip.com/10/Tools/PICmicro/DevEnv/MPLABi/Software/manual/51025b/
index.htm

There are also MPASM/MPLINK/MPLIB manual at

http://www.microchip.com/10/Tools/PICmicro/Code/MPASM/33014g/index.htm

FWIW.

--Bob

--
============================================================
Bob Drzyzgula                             It's not a problem
bob@drzyzgula.org                until something bad happens
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