| Re: Visual Basic & IDL [message #14244] |
Sat, 06 February 1999 00:00  |
rivers
Messages: 228
Registered: March 1991
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Senior Member |
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In article <79f8qg$33r$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>, kluegel@lanl.gov writes:
> Does anyone out there have any experience integrating Visual Basic with IDL?
> The mathematical capabilities of IDL are very good, but the GUI side seems
> primitive. I'm looking into the possibility of somehow taking advantage of
> the strong GUI capability of Visual Basic while using the mathematical and
> visualization capabilities of IDL. We are gearing up to develop a production
> program which may be about 100,000 lines of code. Thanks for any help.
IDL has features under Windows to do exactly this, IDL's ActiveX interface.
We are using this to do exactly what you ask about. The application is an
optical spectrometer for measuring temperature in a laser-heated diamond anvil
cell. The application is structured as follows:
- The GUI is written in Visual Basic. There are 2 graphics windows in the
Visual Basic "form" in which IDL displays plots.
- Visual Basic reads a Princeton Instruments CCD spectrometer using the COM
(Component Object Model) interface in the Princeton Instruments software.
- Visual Basic passes the spectra to IDL to calculate temperatures using
grey-body models. IDL displays its results graphically in the plot windows
in the Visual Basic form.
It sounds complicated, but it's not. It works very well, and takes advantage
of the strenghts of each system.
By the way, I highly recommend National Instruments Component Works ActiveX
library for Visual Basic. This gives you really nice widgets for numeric
input, sliders, etc., plus lots of math routines and nice 2-D plotting widgets.
With Component Works you only need to use IDL for the most complex stuff.
____________________________________________________________
Mark Rivers (773) 702-2279 (office)
CARS (773) 702-9951 (secretary)
Univ. of Chicago (773) 702-5454 (FAX)
5640 S. Ellis Ave. (708) 922-0499 (home)
Chicago, IL 60637 rivers@cars.uchicago.edu (e-mail)
or:
Argonne National Laboratory (630) 252-0422 (office)
Building 434A (630) 252-0405 (lab)
9700 South Cass Avenue (630) 252-1713 (beamline)
Argonne, IL 60439 (630) 252-0443 (FAX)
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