TS OI and MFC

[Dia]

Is there any way one can make use of the TS OI controls with out the need for MFC?

[James_Grey]

The OI controls are ActiveX controls and can be used anywhere ActiveX controls can be used. For example, they can be used on LabVIEW VIs, .NET forms, LabWindows CVI panels, etc.

Are you asking if they can be used in a C++ app without using MFC, or perhaps, are you referring to the fact that the controls depend on the MFC runtime dll?

[Dia]

Yes. I wanted to know if they could be used in a C++ app without using MFC. Is there any way to this?

[James_Grey]

TS OI controls no different from other ActiveX controls, so any framework that allows you to use ActiveX controls in C++ without MFC will work.

That said, the only one I can think of is WTL (Windows Template Library?) which is an unsupported Microsoft extension to ATL. I'm not an expert in WTL, but I know that the learning curve is high and the documentation is terse. For simplicity, I'd stick to MFC if at all possible. There might be other frameworks available, but I'm not familiar with any.

Why can't you use MFC, at least for the control hosting windows? You are not going to save any resources by avoiding it because many components, TestStand included, load the MFC dll.

[Dia]

I am limited to win32 console because of an existing in house tools I am supposed to use.

It can still be done you think? Where do I start?

[SijinK]

Hi Dia,

As James mentioned our TestStand OI Controls are activex Controls. So as long as your ADE(Application Development Environment) can handle activeX controls, then it should be no different when it comes to the TS OI controls. MFC's make this communication with activex controls a lot easier. I tried googling to get more information about activeX controls from native C++ environments and it looks like its been done but it will most definitely be a lot of work.

SijinK
National Instruments.