Example #3

Material Handling Sortation

Simple Animation

Finally we do something interesting.  Since everything on TV nowadays is "reality programming" we'll try that approach here.  

Congratulations on your first job out of school as manager of the material handling department.  You quickly look around at all of the manual labor and decide that automating some of the material handling will result in lower labor costs, fewer errors, and better quality and consistency (don't forget -- better, faster, and cheaper).  

In this example you are shipping barrels -- it could be boxes, raw materials, parts, or anything else.  The sorting could be based on size of barrel / box, weight, product type, bar code label, or any other criteria. In this example you select what conveyor the barrel is placed on.   

This example is designed to demonstrate the following:

• The .NET GDI+ graphics classes.  You should read the chapters and examples in all of your books on GDI before reviewing this example.  We could call this project the "rectangle" project since most things are composed of rectangles -- but we won't.  That is what we use GDI+ for -- is to draw a lot of rectangles to simulate conveyors, overhead crane, pistons, etc. 
• The other way to do this application is to draw all the conveyors and such in some drawing package, save as jpg or gif files, and then load as picture objects in VB.NET or C#.  Then you can move the picture object around the screen. 
• This example demonstrates how to implement a sequential state machine.   Small sequential state machines are easy to implement in VB and C#.  Large state machines are actually broken down into substates to reduce the size and complexity.  

In VB6 we had the "shape" control that allowed us to draw rectangles, circles, and lines on the form at design time.  We loose this capability in .NET.  That is a shame because in the world of WYSIWYG RAD -- you would expect capabilities like the shape control.  It is much more difficult to create these objects during run-time and get them positioned properly.  Lots of write code, build, run, view and suggest changes -- change code, build, run, view and suggest changes -- ...  Note that for our customers we do include the source code for many custom controls. 

In VB6 we had both the picture control and the image control and used both for the barrel in the VB6 application.  Now in VB.NET and C# we only have the picture control and in ASP.NET we only have the image control.  And the web image control in ASP.NET is nothing like the others :-(.  To view the ASP.NET on-line demo (which is not nearly as nice as the VB.NET or C# versions) click here. 

Download Options

1. Click here to download the Visual Basic 6 source code for this example. 
2. Click here to download the VB.NET source code for this example.  
3. Click here to download the C# source code for this example. 
4. Click here to download the ASP.NET source code for this example. 

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