The VPL tutorials

Just starting on the VPL (Visual Programming Language). I thought this thing was for kids. When I was checking out Lego Mindstorms RCX at the beginning of my studies, one of the main reasons I did not go for it was the provided VPL and lack of support with other languages. Obviously since then, the support has grown and VPLs still exist. What is nice is that I can use Microsoft's VPL and not be confined to the Lego's VPL.

The VPL, as far as I can tell, acts as a 'pleasant' gateway into building a project without having to define every service using code. As far as I am aware, a VPL programmed bot can be ported to a C# (or any other .Net language). That would make my autonomous robots very nice indeed.

If you want to see about code generation: in the VPL, click help --> contents and then click on code generation under the user guide for VPL. There are a few scary things there, but I'm hoping for the best.

I think it's rather unnecessary that Sara did the example with a physical Boe-Bot. I would rather say use the simulation envioronment - that's what it's there for. Not everyone has a Boe-Bot lying around at home while reading the book.

It was at this point that I put Sara's book down and looked at the VPL Introductory tutorials. They do not require any hardware and therefore better suite my purposes.

It's probably better not to ue the XInput controller, since you'll learn a little more about the inputs and controls. Joins are there just to compound data, sort of a struct. The reason forwards, backwards and stop are the same values is that the differential drive will apply the same values to each wheel when performing these operations.

The real power comes in where you don't actually add a simulation environment component, it all depends on what manifest you load. Very cool.