iMadalina on .Life

• If everything is going exactly to plan, something somewhere is going massively wrong.
• Everyone asks for a strong project manger - when they get them they don't want them.
• Overtime is a figment of the naïve project manager's imagination.
• Quantitative project management is for predicting cost and schedule overruns well in advance.
• The sooner you begin coding the later you finish.
  
  

If you ever worked with dll files, then you probably know that sometimes you may come across a dll that you have to use without the library associated file. In this case, you have to build the wrapper yourself, with C++ and function pionters, the condition being, of course, that you know the functions inside the dll.

I happened to stumble upon this issue, without prior notice. Using the Matlab Builder for COM, as impossible as it may sound, I could not build a COM component tha easy. First of all, not all dlls were recognized as COM components when imported into a .NET application and second, the ones that did not produce the "This is not a COM component" error, could not be accessed at all. The solutin - fairly complicated: build the wrapper yourself.

Fortunately, MATLAB 2006a Release comes with the Builder for .NET toolbox, who does all the wrapping you need in order to just import the dll into your .NET application. At http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/loadFile.do?objectId=10344 you can find a very well built and documented example. I found it very useful because it explains in detail how to build the library in Matlab and then what and how to import in your .NET application, because a simple Add Reference will not do if you handle input and output arguments more complicated than strings and float values.

Ok, nice Atlas, nice controls, nice functionality... :)

There are two things that I've stumbled upon while working with Atlas CTPs:

1. not all the properties of the controlls are included in Intellisense. So, even though you have no guidance with that, if you find a property in the documentation, use it with confidence - it exists :)

2. after installing the CTP, I worked with the controls directly in Source View, by manually writing them. But the other day, watching an Atlas tutorial, I saw that the presenter had the controls in the VS 2005 Toolbox. Searching the intenet, I found that this can be accomplished by draggind a certain dll to the Toolbox:

            http://forums.asp.net/thread/1187213.aspx

 So, Atlas "By hand", isn't it ? :)