Airbus X Extended SDK, introduction

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

We created this SDK to allow the developers and manufacturers of hardware en software to interface with the Airbus X Extended.

As I am not a programmer I asked Frank (who written the C++ tool) to explain to me what is included. Here is his explanation:

Basically: Compile DLL, place DLL into e.g. panel folder and call it from panel.cfg.

• To get access to the LVARs of our Airbus it is needed to go the way via a gauge (otherwise no access to these LVARS via C++)
  
• The source code you got is a complete Visual Studio 2008 C++ -Project, which generates a dll, the “AirbusXExtSDK.dll”. This dll needs to be implemented as a gauge into the panel.cfg (e.g. ”gauge62=AirbusXExtSDK!ABXExtSDK_Gauge, 0,0,0,0”) and needs to be copied to according folder.
  
• As soon as the according Airbus (the one with the enhanced panel.cfg) is loaded in FSX an additional gauge is now generated. This gauge is not graphically integrated somewhere in the cockpit, but opens up a free placeable window with some example buttons and labels on it. Some example variables are now read and can be changed by clicking on these buttons.
  
• The user could now make his changes in the according files of the project code to e.g. access additional variables and change the buttons and so on. Thereafter he needs to newly compile the dll, copy it to the according panel folder (can be done automatically via a post build event in VS2008 ) and restart FSX (can also be done automatically by putting the “fsx.exe” into the command line of the debugger). This way some smaller changes can be done directly while debugging, bigger changes require new FSX start.
  
• If a user for example wants to set the ND Mode switch of our Airbus via his own hardware, he has to integrate his own hardware switch state into the c++ code and write it to the variable just as our example button on the window is doing it.
  
• If the user maybe does not need any window at all but just the access to our LVARS, he than could suppress the showing of our window out of source code while all the other communication is done invisible in the background (by commenting out the line “ShowWindow (WindowHandle, SW_SHOWNORMAL);” in AirbusXExtSDK_Gauge.cpp)