What |
| A .Net wrapper that encapsulates the hundreds of intrinsics that are available within CT Summation. Written in VB.Net but easily accessible from
C# also. See Help, Scripting within Summation application
for details on the base API. |
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How |
| The original documentation for the API is essentially stored in an XML file and could be parsed into VB.net code, though significant
clean-up of the auto-generated code was also necessary. |
|
Why |
- Makes it easier to use the Summation API from managed code, allowing for integration that leverages the power of the .Net framework
- Access via C# is especially simplified; communicating with late-binding COM components like Summation can be straightforward via VB.Net but relatively
abstruse via C#
- The presence of full intellisense allows a developer to more easily explore any of the objects and see what properties and methods are available within
- (As of v1.1, the availability of Optional paramaters is clearly displayed via method overloads)
- Error reduction
- avoid misspelling of the entry points and related
- reduce presence of missing/incorrect parameters, relative type safety for the parameters and return types
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Warning |
| The swsom files are intended as a skeleton on which to build and each individual entry point should be verified before using. Yes, this
of course limits to some extent the raison d'être of the wrapper but there are almost 1000 entry points in the .vb and I was only able to perform proper QA on a subset
within each object. There are a number of avenues through which errors could have been introduced: |
- certain intrinsics do not work natively, or at least not in terms of how they are described in the documentation
- the source XML documentation, which served as the basis for the code, was incorrect
- the XML parsing process failed in some manner, producing invalid code
- I did something bad when reviewing the code and trying to improve its friendliness
|
Where
Download from here as a .zip file containing a Visual Studio 2008 .vbproj file and several individual .vb files. There isn't anything
above and beyond .Net 2.0 inherent in the files so a VS 2005 VB project could be created manually, followed by adding in the individual .vb files and a reference to
ADODB (I had used ver 2.7). Also haven't tested with the appropriate free Visual Studio Express edition (Visual Basic Express) but there isn't much fancy in the .vb
except for a couple of Collections references. Even without an IDE, all that's needed is a compiler like msbuild, which is included as part of the .Net framework.
It should be noted that some non-Microsoft compilers likely won't support the XML comments.
NOTE: There is no official relationship between CT Summation any of the code or information available on this website.