Developing NI-488.2 Applications with LabVIEW, LabWindows™/CVI™, and Measurement Studio

National Instruments sells two application development environments, LabWindows/CVI and LabVIEW, and a suite of Visual Studio tools, Measurement Studio. All of these products include instrument driver libraries that make it easier to communicate with your GPIB instruments.

LabWindows/CVI is an interactive ANSI C development environment for building test and measurement and instrument control systems. It includes interactive code-generation tools and a graphical editor for building custom user interfaces. It also includes built-in libraries for IEEE 488.2, VXI, RS-232 control, and plug-in data acquisition. When you order LabWindows/CVI, you also get more than 300 complete instrument drivers, which are modular, source-code programs that handle the communication with your instrument so that you do not have to learn the programming details.

LabVIEW is a complete programming environment that departs from the sequential nature of traditional programming languages and features a graphical programming environment. It includes all the tools needed for instrument control, data acquisition, analysis, and presentation. LabVIEW also includes an extensive instrument driver library.

Measurement Studio is an integrated suite of measurement and automation controls, tools, and class libraries for Visual Studio 6.0 and Visual Studio .NET 2003 and later. Measurement Studio dramatically reduces application development time with ActiveX and .NET controls, object-oriented measurement hardware interfaces, advanced analysis libraries, scientific user interface controls, measurement data networking, wizards, interactive code designers, and highly extensible classes.

For more information about Measurement Studio, LabWindows/CVI, and LabVIEW, contact National Instruments.