Adapting eMote for similar platforms

WilliamAtSamraksh commented 8 years ago

The .NOW and WLN are similar platforms with a lot in common. It would be very nice if a program written for one platform could also be built in Visual Studio for the other. Here's one way it might be done:

Segregate platform-specific features into separate Samraksh.Emote.DotNow and .WLN interops.
Include both DLLs with projects intended for both platforms. Assuming there's no namespace conflict, the only overhead would be the extra size of the program. Visual Studio might even be smart enough to exclude unused DLLs when deploying.
In the Visual Studio Configuration Manager for the solution, define configurations for, say, "Debug DotNOW" and "Debug WLN", which define a conditional symbol of DotNOW or WLN, respectively. Then the code could be adapted easily to the one platform or the other.

ChrisAtSamraksh commented 7 years ago

The .NOW and WLN are very similar and it does lead us to want to use the same program on both, but they are different platforms and at some point they have to be treated differently.

I have just added a method to Samraksh.eMote that lets us determine which hardware platform we are on and then we can have the app do different things based on which platform we have.

Currently we have LCD code spread throughout, which is not good because it breaks the WLN. In the future we could have a "GiveUserFeedback" class which would be able to determine which platform we are running on, and if it is a .NOW it would display on the LCD and on the WLN it would do nothing.

We also need to develop a hardware support package right away in the code cycle for each hardware platform. The LCD class is in the Samraksh.eMote.DotNow dll and with the WLN there is no LCD. I have a Samraksh.eMote.WLN dll but it should have been written a lot earlier in the code cycle.

So in the future we have the app determine the platform we are on and then if the hardware needs to do different things the app can use the appropriate dll at that point.

Nathan-Stohs commented 7 years ago

What do we need on the WLN that is included on the .NOW dlls?

ChrisAtSamraksh commented 7 years ago

It is more a case of items in the .NOW dlls that should not be accessed on the WLN because they don't exist and break things.

Samraksh / eMote

Adapting eMote for similar platforms #458