VPL enhancements

I've used a development environment called Rational Rose Real Time. We've used the tool for robotics and other real time application development. RT is a round trip engineering tool that provides a visual interface for creating capsules (services) ports, connections, protocols, etc. Are there any plans to enhance the VPL?

[331 byte] By [antoniomorandi] at [2008-1-10]

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# 1

There are many plans to enhance VPL with things we had to leave out due to time constraints. One of the most important ones is addressing cross node deployment (distributed diagrams, which the underlying diagram can support today).

What specific features/fixes/enhancements are you looking for?

thanx

GeorgeChrysanthakopoulos at 2007-10-3 >

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# 2

As I mentioned, we use Rational Rose RT as development tool. There are some visual aspects that make it very easy to define ports, protocols, messages, etc. There is a built in timer type that is very easy to use and configure. One of the main diagrams developers use is the state diagram which I realize does not exist at the user level in MSRS.

It seems that the MSRS is a very powerful and attractive messaging system. I think that boiler plate code for things like timers, ports, messages, and handlers could perhaps be done in a graphical environmet that also allowed one to drill down to the code level. As I write this it sounds like I'm asking for a graphical MSRS environment to be part of Visual Studio.

antoniomorandi at 2007-10-3 >

# 3

Hi there,
the past weeks i've been working with DSS/CRR and VPL. My goal was to control (selfmade) robots with MSRS.
This sould be done by selfwritten Services (in c#) wich are connected in VPL. The beginning was hard
but now I'm making great progress..

Of course, i also have some ideas for improvements, so i'm posting it in this topic..

- Possiblity to draw Symbols,blocks,lines, rectangles, arrows in the diagram for comments (see below)
- editable connection lines, like splines in Vector-Graphics or like links in electrical-CAD.
- support of Standart Shortcuts like Ctrl+Scrollwheel for zooming; Alt+Scrollwheel,...
- Categories in the Service-Window, to get a better orientation
- Autoscrolling console - resizeable width for long messages!
- a "For loop" (althoug you can do it with recursion)
- a "Foreach-Loop" ("")
- Create Service-Objects, like "GenericMotor" dependently, like Data-Objects (->input "create")
- Bug: VPL always crashes if you want to edit Data-Connections of a Service which
was altered, especially if a Message-Body was altered in VisualStudio.
- And of course the possibility to reload/refresh Services..

In my opinion, the most interesting part in vpl is not to make it easy for beginners to program their robots, but to make
it easier understanding data-connections and -flows in big projects with a lot of people working on it!
I think it would be great if you'll develop VPL further in this direction.

One step would be to provide a better navigation between you main-diagram and created activities. For example with MSRS VPL1.5
you can't create a custom activity, and import it to a different project (unless you compile it as a service) - or did i miss st.h Wink ?
So i would suggest to provide a Manager to import/export created activites, with the possiblity to edit them directly.

A further step would be to focus a little bit more on tutorials for writing Code in c# an embedding this code in
VPL as a service. Because you'll never be able to write all behaviours in VPL so we'll alwas depend on c#..

Also it would be great if there would be some additional tools, like i've mentioned s.th to draw boxes and underlay them in you
VPL diagram (like those in MS Visio). I mean, you've created a possibility to program by drawing boxes and lines, why relie
on that old fashiond way of text-comments, why shouldn't we take this progress to improve comments? Smile

Also i would love it to be able to replace the standard-Service Symbol(this little gear-wheel)
by custom symbols.

Thanks for everything Wink

regards, Andi

AndreasK at 2007-10-3 >

# 4

oh i forgot:
Is it possible to do not make the tooltips disappear afeter a few seconds? the often contain helpful informations but disappear before i've read them,..

AndreasK at 2007-10-3 >

# 5

Thanks for your feedback. These are good suggestions. We will try to incorporate them in our development

schedule.

- And of course the possibility to reload/refresh Services..

Please check out View --> Reload Services

Andreas

AndreasUlbrich at 2007-10-3 >

# 6

Dankesch?n!