Microstation

dhp11 are specialists in developing applications/add-ins/add-ons for MicroStation and related products.

The developers at dhp11 started programming MicroStation V4 in 1982 - the current version is V8. Over the years many aspects of MicroStation have changed, but one key item has remained constant; the MicroStation Development Language - also known as MDL.

MDL is so closely integrated with MicroStation that applications developed in MDL are indistinguishable from the native MicroStation tools. In fact, many of the core components of MicroStation are themselves written in MDL.

MicroStation has an good development environment and dhp11 have a lot of MicroStation development experience.

The applications we create leverage your MicroStation knowledge to help you get more higher quality work done in less time.

C a s e H i s t o r i e s

Golf - Fairway Course Guides
Rail Engineering - WSAtkins Rail or Balfour Beatty
Electricity Network - Western Power Distribution

M i c r o S t a t i o n D e v e l o m e n t L a n g u a g e

There are many good things about MicroStation but in our opinion the best one is the development language - MDL. While other CAD vendors introduced feeble macro languages and half-baked ways to run native applications, MicroStation V4 introduced a fully formed application programming interface (API) that was years ahead of it's time. Exceptionally well documented and full of examples it was created by programmers for programmers.

Not for the faint hearted, MDL amply rewards the time and effort spent learning it by opening up the internals of MicroStation in a way that is complete and powerful - a truly elegant solution.

M u l t i p l a t f o r m

The beauty and reliablity of MDL and the MicroStation API stems largely from the fact that the early versions of MicroStation ran on a wide variety of different hardware and operating systems: IBM RS6000 (AIX) Intergraph Clipper (CLIX) PC (DOS) PC (Linux) PC (MS-Windows) Sun SPARC (SunOS?) Writing code so that it will perform efficiently on a number of platforms is an excellent way to improve the reliability of the code on all platforms.

M D L a n d t h e C p r o g r a m m i n g l a n g u a g e

We often describe MDL as being 'C like', i.e. similar to the programming language 'C'. It is probably better to say that MDL is a full implementation of a C compiler with the addition of a rich and complete set of function call that integrate fully with the CAD engine. When you realise that large parts of core MicroStation functionality are themselves written in MDL you start to appreciate what a fundamental part MDL plays in MicroStation.