VAXELN

This document, the "VAXELN Application Design Guide (First Edition - March 1985)," serves as a reference and guide for designing applications using the VAXELN toolkit, providing sample programs and solutions to common programming problems. It is intended for programmers and students familiar with Pascal or C, and with foundational knowledge of VAX/VMS and VAXELN.

The guide is structured into an initial "Overview" section and twelve application-specific sections. The "Overview" details how to structure VAXELN applications (considering single/multiple jobs and processes) and outlines best practices for inter-job and intra-job communication using mechanisms like messages, areas, datagrams, circuits, and mutexes.

The subsequent twelve sections each present a specific programming challenge, describe its VAXELN solution, and provide a corresponding example program (often in Pascal or C). Key topics covered include:

• Asynchronous I/O
• C device driver development
• C interfaces to disk and file utilities
• Fast device handling
• Inclusion of FORTRAN routines
• Inter-job and intra-job synchronization
• Making a bootable floppy disk
• Implementing multiple circuit servers
• Accessing self-defining data structures
• Interfacing VAXELN with VAX/VMS
• Using VAXELN time routines