Hey,
We've been trying to find a good time to host a "Programming Camp", and since so many of the people that have shown interest had already planned to attend Bill Palumbo's Camp at the end of October, we're thinking that we'll have it in New Jersey on the Friday before his Camp...Oct 30th. We're aiming it at ShopBotters with a knowledge of programming fundamentals that might want to do things like:
* create specialized or OEM applications that interact with the ShopBot Control software,
* develop add-in virtual tools,
* create parametric project files for ShopBot's 'Project Wizard' system, or
* just learn to take advantage of the extensive programmability of the ShopBot Control software.
The Camp will be very hands-on so you'll need to bring a laptop, and since we'll be using Visual Basic 6 for our programming examples you'll need a copy of either VB5 or VB6 (not VB.net). If you don't have the full version there's a free downloadable "Controls Creation" edition that you can get from Microsoft, and the "Dummies" book folks sell a bundle with a demo version of the software and their "VB6 for Dummies" book that will work fine for the Camp.
Those of you that aren't programmers already won't be left out, though. If you just want to learn a little bit about using the programming commands in the ShopBot language, we'll be doing a session on part file programming on Saturday at Bill's. It will cover topics like using variables and getting user input using the INPUT statement, and you won't need to know anything about programming for this session...just have an interest in learning a little about it.
If the Friday Camp sounds interesting, send me an email and I'll put you on the list. Because of the hands-on nature of this Camp we'll probably have to limit the number of people a little, so the sooner you get in touch the better!
Bill