Company
A worldwide leading supplier of PC-based control software for PC-based machine control. The company offers complete solutions of software and hardware for machine control and monitoring applications. Integration of PC-based software products are proven in full-plant installations worldwide.

Project
The project consisted of the design and implementation of a development application for the process control industry. The objective was to produce a single consistent environment that combines and centralizes work efforts for process control and discrete development. This new development product would eliminate the need for separate software packages that were currently being offered to the same industry. The ensuing architectural design would have to satisfy the requirements of the existing products as well as leave room for future additions as the industry evolves. In the end, the framework would serve as a generic shell that housed customizable and configurable objects in order to build different process control projects.

Solution
C-Sharp worked in conjunction with the existing developers in the finalization of the preliminary specification. We were responsible for much of the C++ and OOD efforts and were solely responsible for the architecture implementation. The application itself was developed using Microsoft’s Foundation Classes (MFC) and other third party custom controls. Interaction between the framework and hosted developer objects was achieved by introducing COM technologies. Specifically, the Microsoft Namespace technology was leveraged to provide a "Explorer" like interface for organizing project hierarchies. ActiveX Documents were utilized to provide generic hosting of non-process control objects such as Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. In addition, the entire help system for the application relied heavily on Microsoft Internet Explorer as an embedded OLE control. The validation phase of the project consisted of rendering legacy process control objects along side newer objects all within the new framework.

Technologies Used
We used the following technologies to solve this problem:

• Microsoft Windows NT 4.0
• Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0
• Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC)
• ActiveX/COM
• Active Template Library (ATL)
• Various third-party custom controls