VisaNs

[Brian_Bidwell]

I don't exactly understand the VisaNs (visa namespace) for .net.  To use it in vb.net 2005 you use the common and visans namespaces.  So if one made a program with VisaNs and then tried it on a computer with an Agilent gpib card and Agilent visa drivers would it work?

I have used NI Visa Com and Agilent Visa Com.  Each of these com's will work on either vendors hardware.

Very confused and want to learn and understand.

[Ebele_Obijiofor]

Hello,

  The VISA C/C++ and COM APIs are all part of the VISA standard, and that's why they work on either hardware. The .NET API is not part of this standard however, and so I don't believe it will work this way.

I think you maybe getting confused between namespaces and assemblies. National Instruments only provides a public VisaNS namespace and not a Common namespace. Now, when you work with our native .NET assemblies, when you add a reference to the VisaNS assembly for example, it pulls in the NationalInstrument.Common assembly because it does use some of the members of that assembly. This assembly is used by several other assemblies as well. So you just needs to add the NationalInstruments.VisaNS namespace to your code and then everything should be good.

If you have Measurement Studio, there are a lot of walkthroughs and concept help topics to use but if not, you can use the NI Measurement Studio .NET Class Library help section in the help.  There is an entire section in that class library topic called Using the Measurement Studio VisaNS .NET Library that you can use to get started. 

You can also look at our examples in the C:\Program Files\National Instruments\MeasurementStudioVS2005\DotNET\Examples\Visa directory.

Hope this helps. Thanks!

Regards,