GPIB Vi's vs. opening a VISA session

[April H]

Hi,
I'm currently trying to develop a simple set of drivers for a GPIB device that we have (Stanford Research Systems SR430). I have used the Developer Zone and the guidelines and templates given there. Those templates all open a VISA session to establish communications with the instrument. I have noticed, however, that some of the GPIB vi's can perform the same functions (reading and writing) using just the address of the device rather than creating a VISA session. Is there any difference to these two methods and if so, which is recommended and why?
Thank you very much,
April

[Dennis_Knutson]

VISA is much preferred. For one thing, VISA works for not only GPIB instruments but also for serial, vxi, and TCP/IP instruments. It is fairly easy to write a single driver that accomodates more than one interface. I've had to do this several times as we have instruments that were sometimes purchased with one or another interface. Another advantage to VISA is that it supports resource sharing and locking. Multiple applications can open the same resource and locking permits the applications to share the resource in a "graceful" manner.