DSC Documentation

[sassos]

Hi all,

does anybody know where I can find documentation about DSC? Somethig which explains deelpy concepts like items, channels, I/O points, BVE refnum (what is a BVE???!!!)... and stuff like that!

Thanks.

sassos

[PaulG.]

Hi all,

does anybody know where I can find documentation about DSC? Somethig which explains deelpy concepts like items, channels, I/O points, BVE refnum (what is a BVE???!!!)... and stuff like that!

Thanks.

sassos

Good luck with that. DSC is not well documented. The best you can do is read whatever you kind find searching "DSC" at NI. There are a few tutorials available as well but no in-depth info you might be looking for.

[viSci]

Tell us what you want to do with the DSC, maybe we can help.

[sassos]

What I need, you say...first of all I need to understand!!

Someone else developed a DSC application which monitors a lot of instruments being part of a complex system, such as demodulators, spectrum analyzers and other exotic machines most communicating via TCP/IP or RS232.

Well, now I need to expand and modify it. I need to understand how the various software components are (necessarily) linked together: which is the role of "BVE", items, channels? and how are they related with the Tag Engine?...

...obviously it's impossible at the moment to ask developer questions!

[MoldySpaghetti]

I feel your pain, I had a somewhat brutal education process with DSC a few years ago. It's an amazing tool, but it can be difficult to learn.

You might be using an old version, since you bring up BVE. DSC is an ancestor of BridgeVIEW, and if you're using an old version you might see artifacts. I don't know for sure what BVE is, but there's a chance it has something to do with Bridgeview, since it was often referred to as BV.

You might find it easier to deal with if you upgrade an old version to the latest. Shared variables made DSC far far easier to use. And the latest version of LV allowed you to search for all instances of a shared variable, which is something I did not have when acquiring a huge DSC project with many floating shared variables. Might sound trivial, but being able to see all instances where a global is written is killer on a huge legacy app.

If you are only going to slightly modify it, you need to weigh the various costs of an upgrade. If on the other hand you think you are going to spend more than a couple weeks of full time programming on this, spending the time & money to upgrade to latest LV & DSC will probably be worth it. You'll most likely break the program and need to recode a few things, but the day or two it takes to do that will be worth mountains of saved debugging time.

[sassos]

I feel your pain, I had a somewhat brutal education process with DSC a few years ago. It's an amazing tool, but it can be difficult to learn.

You might be using an old version, since you bring up BVE. DSC is an ancestor of BridgeVIEW, and if you're using an old version you might see artifacts. I don't know for sure what BVE is, but there's a chance it has something to do with Bridgeview, since it was often referred to as BV.

You might find it easier to deal with if you upgrade an old version to the latest. Shared variables made DSC far far easier to use. And the latest version of LV allowed you to search for all instances of a shared variable, which is something I did not have when acquiring a huge DSC project with many floating shared variables. Might sound trivial, but being able to see all instances where a global is written is killer on a huge legacy app.

If you are only going to slightly modify it, you need to weigh the various costs of an upgrade. If on the other hand you think you are going to spend more than a couple weeks of full time programming on this, spending the time & money to upgrade to latest LV & DSC will probably be worth it. You'll most likely break the program and need to recode a few things, but the day or two it takes to do that will be worth mountains of saved debugging time.

You are wright, but unfortunately it's not my business to decide for the software upgrade!!