possible to use labview drivers in VS.NET?

[Anatoly2]

I just received a set of stages and a U500 controller from aerotech, and the CD came with "labview drivers", which i don't remember seeing before.

I don't use labview, opting for the MS.NET instead, but I was wondering, is it possible to use the provided Labview drivers to access the device from visual studio .net?

[bilalD]

You can try converting those LV VI's to DLLs using the LV aplication builder. And then make calls to those DLL's using P/Invoke in .NET. Or you could ask the manufacturer whether they already have a DLL you could use. They might have a C driver as well.
You can find alot of resources online on how to call native DLLs from .NET languages. Here is a good place to start.

Hope this helps

[ssniguy]

This is a bit off topic for this thread, but I was just wondering if there were any obvious advantages to utilizing VB.net vs. LabVIEW. I'm aware that NI supports VB.net code generation via Measurement Studio. In the last month, I've heard on two separate occasions that LabVIEW does not handle large amounts data to be stored to a DB very well (not sure what DB they were referring to, does it matter??). These same people implied that VB.net supported DB access in a much more robust manner.

Thanks in advance for any input.

john

[bilalD]

Well, it would really depend on the task at hand and your prior experience. I think LV is really great at acquiring, analysing and displaying data really quickly. You don't need to be a programmer to start using LV and create a good looking UI. VB.NET requires some programming and some OOP experience to work with. Another important factor to consider is what kind of programming experience do you currently have. A C/C++ (or other text based languages )user will be able to pick up VB.NET fairly fast, but might have a little trouble with LV because of the different concepts of graphical programming. LabVIEW will have a learning curve there.

The .NET framework does have alot of support for interfacing with databases (since that was one of the key elements Microsoft was considering during its design), but I don't have any benchmarks for doing db access b/w LV and VB.NET. I believe eventaully the decision would boil down to using the tools that you are most familiar with to get the task done and what kind of codebase do you have in your company.
If you already have a C/C++ based background, then you might find developing an application using VB.NET (or C#) faster than trying to figure out how to use LV. But if you don't have programming experience, then you will probably find graphical programming to be more intuitive.

Hope this helps

[Lycangeek]

I'll also point out that there are two ways to work with databases inside LabVIEW.

There is the SQL Toolkit (aka the LabVIEW Database Connectivity Toolkit), which has a set of VIs (LabVIEW functions) specifically designed for the graphical language (uses original ADO under the covers).

In addition, we also have interop with .NET. This allows you to use any of the ADO.NET functionality within LabVIEW.

But Bilal summarized it best in terms of deciding - it is really about the learning curve for the languages.

Brian

[ssniguy]

Many thanks for the replies. This forum is great! I work at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Sunnyvale CA and we have small groups of people migrating away from previously developed LV code to VB.net. I was trying to understand their reasoning. The input here has been very helpful.

Thanks again.

john