LBNL, Berkeley, California
The Advance Light Source (ALS) is in the process of upgrading the high-level controls software. The ALS has always used Windows for operator consoles and slowly has been migrating to the EPICS control system. At the core of the upgrade is the creation of a new EPICS Display Manager based on Windows Vista called WDM. It is written in C# using Visual Studio and is based on the new Microsoft XML-based display building technology – Windows Presentation Manager (WPF). The derivate of XML used by WPF, known as XAML, gives descriptive configuration of the display components. XAML can also define the interactions among user interface (UI) components via Data Binding allowing the creation of an EPICS graphical element without actual programming. However, the use C# code can be added to extend the functionality of a display. This code will have direct access to any UI component but is decoupled from the display layout. An EPICS WPF Toolkit and a new Display Manager as its application will be presented.
