The Trial License is for first-time evaluation of the framework. The Educational License is for any non-commercial use of the framework used for educational purposes. The Professional License is for commercial development and research applications.

The Host Schematic Editor provides effortless creation of hosts, as well as adding new targets and host components to the host. Connections between targets and host components are made using a powerful visual schematic editor.

Virtuoso host applications are standard .NET WPF applications. If you know how to program in the host language, like C#, you have unlimited control with what you can do with the target virtual device. The host schematic editor just makes adding and connecting virtual components extremely easy and intuitive.

The schematic editor is built to be extensible, so you can easily provide the framework with metadata about your custom C# components, and use the components in the schematic editor as well. You can even write and share your Virtuoso components with others.

The Target Model Builder is the tool used to create virtual targets that run in your host, and interact with your target from your host language, like C#. The Target Model Builder handles all of the work of emitting/rendering a target model class which runs in the host.

At runtime, each target in the host can be virtually powered or held in reset independently, or one target’s digital output can even be used to stop or run another target. It’s built to be as close to physical hardware as possible, so that the virtual device you are building is truly fully useable as a system level test harness.

The standard control library is a set of components provided out of the box to cover the most commonly needed runtime interactions for embedded systems. The components include both HMI user interaction components such as knobs, gauges, and buttons, as well as communications oriented components like serial port and TCP/IP socket connections. Writing data from your virtual target to a serial port is a trivial matter in Virtuoso.

The host solution consists of the host project, such as a C# WPF project, and one or more targets. Each target is its own project, and represents a CPU thread of an embedded microcontroller. The Trial license allows you to run hosts with only one target, however with an Educational and Professional license you can run as many targets as you like. The only limitation will be the practical limitation of the number of cores available on your host CPU.

There are no restrictions on the number of library components that can be added to your application.This is good, because the component library will continue to grow. Once you’ve downloaded a package into your Library, you can drag and drop it onto your schematic and hook it up, and you’re up and running.

Variable bindings are one of the primary ways that Virtuoso facilitates interactions between host components and the target. Any statically linked variable in your Target can be exposed as a property on the Target Model. These exposed properties can be used as digital outputs, analog inputs, LCD display buffers, or even eMMC flash or EEPROM memory. For persistent memory like eMMC flash and EEPROM, Virtuoso can manage the persistence of your data between target executions and host sessions. You just need to check a box and the framework handles everything for you.

Streams are the means of sharing continuous streaming data or messages between the host and target.

Interrupts expose embedded C ISR handlers as methods on the target model class. The interrupt also shows as a port on the target schematic component, and can be connected to any event to be triggered.

Events allow the embedded C application to fire events to signal other host components. The event shows as a port on the target component for connection to other event handlers, or could be used to trigger the interrupt for a different target.