What are my options for controlling a third party LabVIEW executable from .NET

[bengartner]

A vendor gave me a LabVIEW executable that works with a tool for our test setup. They have been slow to even give us the tool, so I'm not hopeful they'll be giving us any source or VIs that we can customize to our purpose. I want to integrate the tool into our test software so it's fully automated.

What are my options for controlling the LabVIEW software from my .NET application (using Visual Studio 2013 and .NET 4.5)? I have sucessfully opened a generic .vi file using the ActiveX library (LabView.Application and GetVIReference) but I can't tell if there's a way to access this functionality from an exe. Is there any way to do this?

The .ini file also seems to imply that the VI Server is enabled, but I can only find examples of accessing the VI Server from LabView. Is there any way to access this from my C# application directly? If not, is it conceivable that I could write a shell VI to control the executable through a VI Server and then access that shell from my C# app?

The executable seems to have been created with LabView 2011. I'm open to suggestions if there's some other way to control this software.

[Eric.M]

It all depends on how the exe was built. I'd go for one of those 2 methods :

- VI Server (well if you code with VS, it will not help that much :)) -> Example here

- ActiveX. If they built the exe as an activeX server, the exe will expose some methods (through a tlb file). They can be easily used as long as you have obtained the right reference. Some insight here

--Eric