Components are just slipped into Visual Studio to empower the visual properties of a form display. Usually available from the toolbox no installation is required. Usually there is a C#.cs file, a resource resx file and designer file. An add component walk through will provide the required information to do this.
These are not improvements but enhancements to the standard textbox in order to facilitate numerical operations the standard text box allows entry of any alphanumeric information, not something that is desirable when dealing with numbers, so by providing some additional on the fly processing input can be restricted to numerical information. Here there is a Numerical TextBox for integer numbers to base 2, 4, 8, 10 and 16. A Decimal textbox and a Double textbox.
Building upon the Numerical TextBox, 4 of these text areas are grouped and entry limited to a valid IPv4 address, expansion to IPv6 is easy.
The LED is commonly used as an indicator of status element on equipment front panels. When an application is developed to control an equipment it is common practice to emulate the front panel functions, to that end LED components are used on windows forms to simulate the front panel function. From the basic LED other types of display can be constructed, such as a LedBar as a level meter or the commonly used VU meter.
An alternative to the LedBar, a traditional progress bar in the form of a pure control. As a variation this is for a vertical orientation. This component came after the LedBar so there are a number of common aspects. There are up to three colour zones, the bar can be solid or segmented (a la LED), there are a number of shading schemes, so the design is very flexible since everything is derived from a basic Control rather than a UserControl.
Use this as the basis of your VU meter on your mixer panel, that is what it was originally developed for!
A flat button is a button that does not move. So how does the user interact with a flat button, well with colours. This button was in fact intially designed for field engineers using an iPad for running diagnostics on a transmitter when "up the mountain". On an iPad everything is done with fingers and the engineers wanted feedback. So a button was designed with colours in mind to represent the button states. Two colours for a push button, three colours for a latching button
Later there came a PC version so that the off field presentation was the same as the in field presentation. A mouse is used instead of fingers but as now touch sensitive screens are becoming more common it would be reasonable to move more to the iPad original!
SNTP stands for Simple Network Time Protocol (implying there is a CNTP as well!). Very usefull for esuring devices are correctly timed. It is alright having a crystal clock, either explicit (Maxim DS1308) or implicit (the CPU with a real time clock) but unless the clock is held in a temperature controlled oven (very expensive) it will loose/gain time.
However there is a very easy way of keeping the time correct, assuming there access to Internet, that is to poll a time server periodically to get the real time and update the clock of the device in question. Time servers are special servers, located all over the web, (Normally several per country) that provide a time service for any one who cares to launch a time request. That request is made by sending a SNTP formated request to the server and if politely made the time server will send back the current universal time. ie: the time received is not dependent ofn the location of the server or the location of the request. Though as to seen later it is convenient to us a server located in the same country as the petition source
SNMP stands for Simple Network Management Protocol (Is there a CNMP as well?). This is a universal protocol for management of network devices and that means any type of network not just IP, LAN but serial, CAN, microwave, radio, in fact anything that has bi-directional communication.
SNMP works by assigning an octet based number (OID = object identifier), similar in format to an IP address, to a property of a piece of equipment. This number can be so large as to be sufficient to ask the properties of every electron in the universe. So it is unlikely that OID's will run out in the near future.