Newbie question : LabView vs VISA vs Measurement Studio

[reteb]

Sorry, this is a very basic question, I realize.
Yet I need some explanation.

I use NI's GPIB PCI 488.2 Interface Card along with LabView 7 for my various GPIB gear ( and I found that even RS232 gear can be controlled with LV ).
The more I get involved with LabView the more enthusiastically I get.

However, two questions are still unresolved for me.

1.
What is the advantage of using VISA ( apparently being part of my LV7 package ) over LV's G language ?
As far as can understand, VISA programs in C++ what LabView does graphically, or am I wrong ?
Why should one use VISA instead of G ?

2.
What is the advantage or difference of Measurement Studio over VISA ?

Thanks for any help.

[Dan_Mondrik]

I realize this can be confusing to newcomers, so don't worry about asking. You're making comparisons between the wrong pieces of the software stack.

The application development environment is the, well, environment in which you create your application. The primary choices from NI are LabVIEW for graphical programming, LabWindows/CVI for ANSI C programming, and Measurement Studio for other textual language programming (C++, C#, VB.NET). The last of these is actually a set of plug-ins to Microsoft Visual Studio, which serves as the host development environment.

Within any of these environments, you have a choice of APIs from NI for the specific types of hardware you need to control. In your case, you need to control Serial and GPIB instruments. Yo
ur API choices are VISA (for controlling pretty much any type of traditional instrument) or NI-488 (specifically for controlling GPIB instruments). VISA abstracts away some of the bus details so you can focus on the message-based commands and responses, for example. VISA handles the I/O.

Also, from any of these development environments, you may call into other components such as instrument drivers, written by a number of vendors. Most instrument drivers these days expose VISA data types in the function signatures because they're written using VISA.

I hope this helps.

Dan Mondrik
National Instruments