This seminar was geared to component developers and provided hands-on instruction. The course was a mix of presentations and on-hands coding sessions supported by the trainers. The course outline was as follows:

• A GENTLE INTRODUCTION TO THE .NET FRAMEWORK (2 hrs)

The first course section introduced the .NET framework, highlighting aspects where it mostly differs from “conventional” programming technologies such as VB or C++. The execution of so-called managed code in virtual machines was explained and the deployment of code in assemblies containing code combined with metadata was introduced. The major part of this first section was concerned with the .NET way of language interoperability, which is a fundamental prerequisite for the interaction with environments using COM.

• CAPE-OPEN SPECIFIC INTEROPERABILITY (2 hrs)

The second section introduced basics for CAPE-OPEN interoperability and was mostly concerned with the appearance of CAPE-OPEN data types in COM and .NET as well as the mapping of interface definitions. Using the development environments it was demonstrated how CAPE-OPEN interfaces can be imported into the .NET environment so that they can subsequently be used for implementation. The practical part of this course section covered the implementation of the interfaces ICapeIdentification and ICapePort for the sample mixer unit operation.

• ADVANCED CAPE-OPEN PROGRAMMING WITH .NET (4 hrs)

The third and final section of the training course was concerned with advanced issues of implementing the CAPE-OPEN standard. After a theoretical part on the handling of collections, participants were able to develop the implementation of port and parameter collections for the sample unit. Further, the automatic registration of the unit operation for the COM runtime was discovered and implemented.

The instructors were Dr Bill Barrett from US EPA and Dr Lars von Wedel from AixCAPE e.V. Both have gained wide experience in using .NET in the development of CAPE-OPEN compliant Process Modelling Components and Process Modelling Environments.

Bill Barrett, US EPA (left) - Session in progress (right), courtesy of Lars von Wedel

The course gathered twenty attendees from Akzo Nobel Chemicals (The Netherlands), BASF (Germany), Belsim (Belgium), Halias Technologies (France), HTRI (USA), IFP (France), INPT-ENSIACET (France), Kongsberg Maritime AS (Norway), LINDE (Germany), Max-Planck Institute (Germany), SASOL (South Africa), Scandpower Petroleum Technology (Norway).