The Protein Crystallography Beamline at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source is a facility that is being used to solve the structure of proteins. The software that is being used to control this beamline uses Java for user interface applications which communicate via CORBA with workstations that control the beamline hardware. We describe the software architecture for the beamline and our experiences after two years of operation.

Mono is an independent implementation of the .NET Framework by Novell that runs on multiple operating systems (including Windows, Linux and Macintosh) and allows any .NET compatible application to run unmodified. For instance Mono can run programs with graphical user interfaces (GUI) developed with the C# language on Windows with Visual Studio (a full port of WinForm for Mono is in progress). We present the results of tests we performed to evaluate the portability of our controls system .NET applications from MS Windows to Linux.

We have developed a .NET assembly, which we call SCA.NET, which we have been using for building EPICS based control room applications at the Advanced Light Source (ALS). In this paper we report on our experiences building a 64-bit version of SCA.NET and the underlying channel access libraries for Windows XP x64 (using a dual core AMD Athlon CPU). We also report on our progress in building new accelerator control applications for this environment.

A cross-platform component for EPICS Simple Channel Access (SCA) has been developed. EPICS client programs with GUI become portable at their C++ source-code level both on Windows and Linux by using Borland C++ Builder 6 and Kylix 3 on these platforms respectively.