Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Chris Timossi <[email protected]> · Thu, 10 Apr 1997 14:14:25 -0700

Hi Rolf,

You've hit on an area of the win32 distribution which has some
rough edges. I posted the binaries (ca.dll, sca.dll, ezca.dll) 
with the idea of saving people the effort of building EPICS when
they just wanted to build CA clients using Labview, Visual Basic,
or even C with SCA or EZCA. The problem comes when you want to call ca directly from C. You need the EPICS header files. Now there are two
issues. First, who distributes these headers. Second, some headers
are only produced during an EPICS build because they're platform
dependent. I didnt make a real attempt to resolve these issues. I
ended up distributing some headers specific to WIN32 and then assumed
that you would have access to an EPICS source tree to get the rest.

Thanks for the tip about stdarg/varargs; for me, using MSVC, it's
generated compiler warnings that I've been meaning to look into.

Kay-Uwe Kasemir <[email protected]> has developed a win32 build
script for EPICS that you may want to try; it will generate the
headers you need as well as ca.dll. I'm not sure about it's 
availability at this moment. Jeff probably knows. I believe Kay also 
has built a DDE server for CA.

Feel free to contact me if you have more problems.

Chris

At 10:57 AM 4/10/97 -0700, you wrote:
>Hello Chris,
>
>	Maybe my first experience with the WIN32 channel access libraries is of
>interest to others: I pulled the WIN32 stuff from the EPICS distribution
>a couple of days ago. scaget and scaput worked out of the box which was
>nice. Then I tried to write a small Windows95 channel access client,
>using only calls to ca.dll. I had to get a bunch of .h files from our
>UNIX distribution which were not in the .ZIP file (callback.h,
>epicsTypes.h, shareLib.h). I was using Borland C++ 5.0 and had a compile
>problem with errmdef.h which tried to include vararg.h in addition to
>stdarg.h. I applied the following fix then everything worked:
>
>#ifdef __STDC__
>#       include <stdarg.h>
>#else
>#ifndef __STDARG_H   /* added RK 970409 */
>#       include <varargs.h>
>#endif               /* added RK 970409 */
>#endif
>#include <ellLib.h>
>
>
>Additional question:
>Is there a PC based channel access client somewhere which is a DDE
>server?
>				Thanks    - rolf -
> 
>-- 
>+----------------------------------------------------------+
>: Rolf Keitel                |    [email protected]           :
>: TRIUMF                     |    Tel: (604) 222-7453      :
>: 4004 Wesbrook Mall         |    Fax: (604) 222-7307      :
>: Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3   |    www.triumf.ca            :
>+----------------------------------------------------------+

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System