ni4882 redistribution

[unimaginative]

I am building a series of in-house c# applications used for controling the manufacturing process for our embedded products, and need to be able to install my apps without first installing NI drivers.  Can I simply include the NI.NI4882.dll as a reference without worrying about the other drivers? or do I always need to install the whole NI installation package prior to installing our tools?

[JonathanN]

Hi unimaginative,

If you have developed a C# application that is referencing the NI-488.2 assembly and you are now wanting to distribute that application to different locations, you must do 2 things:

1) Ensure all the appropriate files for your C# application are installed onto the target computer. I would suggest creating an installer in Visual Studio that grabs all the dependencies for you automatically. This will include the NI-488.2 assembly. I would check out the Deploying Measurement Studio Applications help topic in the NI Measurement Studio Help. This section tells you what merge modules should be included in your application for correct distribution. I believe these topics should appear even if you don't have Measurement Studio installed.

2) Install the appropriate driver on those target systems. In this case, you must install the NI-488.2 driver on those systems you are deploying to. Without the underlying driver components, your application will not run. The NI-488.2 assembly calls into these underlying driver DLLs so its needs them at runtime.  When you install the NI-488.2 driver, you don't need the Language Support options since that is for development purposes.

Hope this helps!

Best Regards,

[unimaginative]

Jonathan,

Thank you for such a quick reply.  I have one follow-up question:

My C# application is a ClickOnce CAB Application, so most dependencies (including the NI assemblies) are weakly referenced.  This also means that I am not making a traditional installer, rather we install over the net.  Is there some list of DLLs somewhere that I can use and include in the installation rather than depending on VS to generate that list? 

Thank you in advance,

Dave

[JonathanN]

Hi Dave,

Yes, we do have tables of the needed deployment files.  If you want to use merge modules, take a look at the Measurement Studio .NET Merge Modules topic that contains a table of the needed merge modules. If you want to manually copy or include the individual files, see the Measurement Studio .NET XCOPY Deployment Files topic. That has a table that lists out all the needed files associated with an assembly. These topics are in the NI Measurement Studio Help.

See the attached screenshot of the help categories.

Best Regards,

[unimaginative]

Jonathan,

Under Measurement Studio .NET XCOPY Deployment Files, under the NI4882 entry, there are two dlls listed:  Common, and Ni4882.  The entry is also marked with a "4" which refers to a note at the bottom of the page indicating that drivers contained on the device cd are needed.  Does that mean that Common and Ni4882 are those drivers, or are additional resources needed?  I need to be able to just add a discrete number of dlls and/or files to my application manefest, deploy them to my site and watch them go... is this a feasible goal?

Also,  because we install over the net, merge modules are out of the question because there is no msi file to merge them into.

Thx,
Dave

[JonathanN]

Hi Dave,

If you notice on that same page, that  note is applied to the DAQ and VISA assemblies as well.  If your application uses any hardware .NET assemblies (DAQ, VISA, GPIB, etc), you must install the actual driver on the target computers. The .NET libraries are just the top-level interface that communicate to the low-level driver components. Thus you need the actual driver installed.  For your application to function properly, you need to install only the run-time components of the necessary drivers (i.e. you don't need to install IDE support at all).

Best Regards,