Developing Nodes and Libraries for VL

This workshop showed how to add your own nodes to vl by comfortably importing external libraries or manually writing C# code.

Who was the target audience of the workshop?
Anyone who wants to add their own nodes to vl and/or build their own node-libraries for it.

What did attendees of the workshop learn?

There are two ways to add your own nodes to vl:

• importing them from existing libraries with a few clicks
• writing c# code.

We first looked at the simple route and showed how easy it is to import nodes from any .net library, think drag’n’drop. But when someone claims “easy” you’re naturally skeptical because that also must mean some limitations, right? Indeed, and that is where we switched to writing some c# code to show you how with literally a few lines of code you write nodes for vl, think much fewer lines than the vvvv c# plugininterface.

At some point you’ll not only want to quickly get access to some thirdparty libraries but design your own libraries and make sure to provide a consistent set of nodes even when a thirdparty library, that you rely on, changes. By looking at different libraries we discussed different strategies of importing and wrapping them with some patching or writing c# in order to make them ready for the dataflow nature of visual programming.

For a quick peak into vl see:
VL Introductory Overview
Dynamic VL Plugins for vvvv Quick Reference