Using Microsoft Visual Basic to Create a Graphical Front-End for a CSIM19 Model
This document describes how to use Microsoft Visual Basic to quickly and easily create a graphical front-end for a CSIM19 simulation written in C. The example used in this document is a simple service center phone bank. The source for this example is included with this document. You will not be able to compile the source yourself unless you own the CSIM19 libraries. This document assumes that readers are reasonably familiar with CSIM19 and basically proficient in Microsoft Visual Basic and Microsoft Visual C++. Obviously the methods described here are also applicable in other development environments, as long as users know their preferred development tools well enough.
The first step in this process is to create your CSIM model as you would normally. In our example, the model was first written and compiled as a standard Win32 console application using Microsoft Visual C++ 6. The original console program is included in this tutorial package and is called phone.exe. In this stage it is easy to find and fix all the bugs in the model itself without worrying about problems anywhere else. It is important to verify that the model gives the correct output at this stage, so that it will be easier to catch any bugs in the GUI later.
At this point we can design the Visual Basic interface. For our simple example, the program only really needs one, single form. In the source project there are two forms, but one is simply a home-made help screen. All the user needs to do is give the model some numbers and then get some other numbers back. For this, the Visual Basic form just needs a text field for each simulation parameter, and a space with some label objects to show the results. A simple mschart object has also been included in the example to show the results of several trials when the user enters a range for the number of operators to try.
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Tags: bugs, development environments, development tools, interface, libraries, microsoft, microsoft visual c 6, Microsoft Visual C++, mschart, preferred development, simulation, source project, visual c 6
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