VL for vvvv users

Who was the target audience of the workshop?
This workshop was specifically targeted at people who are familiar with vvvv and are hitting its boundaries to many of which vl offers convenient solutions. If you ever found vvvv is missing features to better structure your programs, you’ll love vl!

What did attendees of the workshop learn?
In a first step we looked at similarities between vvvv and vl to make people feel comfortable in the new environment. Many things you know from vvvv can still be applied to vl and we tried to convince you that basically everything is still the same only better.

When we hit spreading we had to make sure everyone got the difference between “Spreads” and “Automatic Spreading” both of which you’re used to in vvvv and why we don’t have the latter in vl. We did discuss what disadvantages that has for simple scenarios but what much bigger advantages we gain by using explicit loops in vl.

After we got through the loops we came to probably the single most powerful feature of vl that is the possibility to create your own datatypes. May sound abstract to you at this point but will be the most normal thing for you to do once you get into using vl.

Finally we gave a quick overview of some more advanced topics that come with vl, like: generics, delegates, async and reactive programming, only to tease you with many more things you’ll be able to expand your skills to in the future.

For a quick peak into vl see:
VL Introductory Overview
Dynamic VL Plugins for vvvv Quick Reference
The Gray book – Visual Programming (VL)