> End project was to build a control/monitoring application for an electric motor
This is actually a funny use-case for .NET as anything low-level and hardware oriented tended to be harder to do without the libraries, which (if they existed) weren't .NET
Not sure what the hard limitations were that you refer to; VB.NET / C# where always the easiest way to get a windows GUI (WinForms) app running. For industrial computing solutions tended to use Windows CE and Windows XP with COM apps.
This is ages ago - but IIRC, we did it something like this
Motor - VFD - PLC - OPC server - OPC client
The .NET Application worked purely as a GUI read/write data from/to the PLC.
But of course there were other things involved, like database programming, API service, webdev. We made a very, very simple API in ASP.NET I think, and some website in PHP which would just plot the various motor values.
This is actually a funny use-case for .NET as anything low-level and hardware oriented tended to be harder to do without the libraries, which (if they existed) weren't .NET
Not sure what the hard limitations were that you refer to; VB.NET / C# where always the easiest way to get a windows GUI (WinForms) app running. For industrial computing solutions tended to use Windows CE and Windows XP with COM apps.