CHANNEL ACCESS CLIENTS ON THE MICROSOFT WINDOWS PLATFORM
B. Martlew · 2007
The control system for the Energy Recovery Linac Prototype (ERLP) under construction at Daresbury uses the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) and vxWorks on VME64x [1]. The client software in use during the commissioning of the accelerator is based on PC consoles running Red Hat Linux 9. Synoptic displays and engineering panels are created using the Extensible Display Manager (EDM) and other standard EPICS extension software is used for archival, alarm handling etc. The Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS) control system uses a bespoke control system with client software on PC consoles running Microsoft Windows. We would like to employ a similar approach for the operational client software on ERLP with Channel Access (CA) clients running on Microsoft Windows PC consoles. However, the Microsoft Visual Studio development tools and ActiveX/COM technologies used for creating client side software on the SRS control system are now outdated and have been superseded by the .NET framework and associated developer tools. This paper discusses the different options currently available for developing CA clients on the Microsoft Windows platform, along with progress in creating CA clients for the .NET framework.