Whats Good To Know

<< Back to the SharedPhidgets page


Good to know: development

  1. VisualStudio.NET: to develop your own applications with the SharedPhidgets toolkit, you have to use one of the VisualStudio.NET languages, e.g. C#, Visual Basic or J#. We recommend to use C#, because the source code of all examples and the toolkit itself is written in C#; but you can also easily adapt the examples to one of the other languages.
  2. Event-driven architecture: we recommend, that you get familiar with using events and creating event handlers in .NET (e.g. C# and VisualBasic). Some main parts of the interaction with the SharedPhidgets components are based on events.
  3. Development: you should use the .NET library components when developing your own applications! While there is a way to directly work with the entries in the shared dictionary, you have to be aware that because of the multiple threads running for the notifications, you then have to use Invoke and BeginInvoke methods when manipulating Windows forms from within the notification methods. There are also some other drawbacks when using the dictionary directly, so the easier way is to use the .NET library components of the SharedPhidgets toolkit.

Good to know: Phidgets

  1. Get familiar with the different types of Phidgets and their functionality. While the toolkit uses all these Phidget devices, we are not explaining their functionality in detail. Some good pages to start:
  2. Phidgets are devices to build physical user interfaces, and while you are getting only the rough component when you buy a Phidget device, you can immediately start thinking about building a wrapper around these devices. The embedding in everyday artifacts is very challenging :-). Here you can find a lot of examples:

Good to know: network

  1. Firewall: make sure that your firewall opens the ports for all SharedPhidget applications (you can read details about network port control in the documentation of your firewall software). If any port is blocked, the SharedPhidgets toolkit might not work properly.
  2. Network infrastructure: connect all the computers that you want to use for your SharedPhidgets application to the network. Configure the network BEFORE starting with the development of your applications.