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Will Measurement Studio 2015 support Visual Studio 2015?

Will Measurement Studio 2015 support Visual Studio 2015, or will it be a version behind, again.Smiley Mad

It is annoying to say the least when you have to either use an older Visual Studio or implement 'tricks' to get Measurement Studio to work with the latest Visual Studio. Newer versions of Visual Studio generally include many improvements which make my job easier. Visual Studio 2015 appears to continue to improve the developer experience. If Measurement Studio 2015 is not going to integrate with Visual Studio 2015, I may have to consider dropping Measurement Studio along with National Instruments.

I am currently looking to replace my older NI products with new ones (many thousands of $). If I am going to have to continue to fight with Measurement Studio/Visual Studio compatability issues, I might as well move to some other DAQ hardware supplier that will provide better integration. 

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Message 1 of 29
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Hi dwk,

 

Thank you for your post, I understand how important this information might be for your application. Unfortunately, this information about Measurement Studio 2015 is proprietary, and is not something we have made publically available yet.

 

Regards,

 

 

Regards,

Kristen M

Automated Test Product Marketing Engineer
National Instruments
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I'm also anxious for Measurement Studio to catch up with Visual Studio 2013 which it is my understanding will occur within the next few months with the release of Measurement Studio 2015 since trying to keep track of which control .dlls to use for which version of .NET without a wizard to do it for you is a big pain.  In the meantime, Visual Studio 2015 is coming out soon with a whole new paradigm shift for Microsoft as they "embrace open source":  

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/11/12/announcing-net-2015-preview-a-new-era-for-net.aspx

 

However, I think that expecting NI to support Visual Studio 2015 any time soon is not a reasonable expectation.  After reading the article linked above I don't think Microsoft knows where they are heading let alone what things will look like when they get there. Expecting someone, in this case NI, to know where Microsoft is going to end up and then have support for their products ready when they get there is not reasonable.  

 

I have been using NI products for 15 years  starting with CVI and then moving through Measurement Studio for Visual Studio 6.0 and then to Visual Studio 2003 when I switched to C# development and now Visual Studio 2013.  The experience Measurement Studio has provided of controlling all of my instrumentation from within Visual Studio has always been a pleasure.  The instrument driver wizard for C# continues to come through allowing me to bring instrument drivers written for CVI into C# without problems.  The support has always been there over the years and I am very grateful for the symbiotic relationship I have with NI.

 

All I am saying is that I don't want NI to get upset and drop Measurement Studio support since LabVIEW is their main money maker and they could walk away from supporting Measurement Studio entirely without it severely hitting their bottom line.  Instead, I would encourage all Measurement Studio users to give the Measurement Studio developers at NI a clear set of needs so that they can focus on covering the majority of concerns with each future release.  It's been a good ride so far and I hope it lasts for years to come.

Grant M. Johnson
Project Engineer
LECO Corporation
Message 3 of 29
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Can anyone advise when the next release (presumable 2015) of measurement studio will be announced/shipped?

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Message 4 of 29
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Frank334,

 

The Measurement Studio and .NET Developers NI Community page is the best place to find announcements related to Measurement Studio. This post mentions the timeline for the release of Measurement Studio 2015. 

 

Julia P.
Message 5 of 29
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Everyone seems to think that the link you provided actually is of any use. The NI team certainly does not appear to visit this page very often, or pay it any attention. The most recent post is over 3 months old. The last post from a NI member was December of 2014. The one befroe that was April of 2014. Hello? Is there anybody actually working there?

I have been using Measurement Studio since its inception (Component Studio) because I did not like LabView. Early on Measurement Studio received lots of attention from NI. Now it is the forgotten step-child.

The first half of 2015 is almost over and still no word on when, or if, Measurement Studio 2015 will be released. You would think it is some top secret government project or that the team only works 2 or 3 days a week or that they do not realize that they are building this project for someone else (us). A blog for developers that only has 12 posts over 4 years is hardly a blog.

 

As for the original question concerning VS 2015 support, it cannot be that difficult to write extensions that provide the proper links to libraries needed for licensing. And integrating the help libraries is done by other companies, why is it so difficult for NI to do the same? It is not as though that much has changed in VS as far as extensions is concerned.

I don't mind them waiting to provide integration with the latest version of the .Net Framework, but VS supports several versions of the Framework. NI could simply inform us that we should use a particular version of the Framework if we want to include Measurement Studio libraries in our project. This is one of the beauties of Visual Studio and the .Net Framework. You can build your application against whichever version of the Framework you need to use and still use the latest improvements to the IDE. I do this all the time with libraries from other companies when moving to newer versions of Visual Studio.

To me, the problem appears to be with NI's licensing system. They appear to have issues with building the licenses.licx files. Maybe they should find a better way to handle this issue in order to better keep up with changes to Visual Studio. Or provide a seperate application that we can use as an aide for building a valid licx file outside of Visual Studio. There are usually enough valuable changes in Visual Studio that I want to use the latetest version. This is why I pay for membership in MSDN and NI SSC.

I would be willing to have to use a seperate help system if necessary, but having to deal with the funcky licensing system is a problem.

If my probing for attention from NI's developers is going to make them drop Measurement Studio then they are simply looking for a reason to do so.

Message 6 of 29
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How much have you really looked into this?  NI is supporting all versions of Visual studio you just don't get the Measurement Studio tab at the top of VS2013 and so the license wizard isn't there to let you easily add and remove controls.  How often do you have to do that?  I create my projects in VS2010 and lock the framework at 4.0.  Then I get my GUI the way I want it and load the project in VS2013 and expect everything to license and be fine.  I'm doing this with no problems.  If I want the measurement studio tools from withing VS2013 then there is a procedure on how to manually add them.  You have to do this once per project but then you are good to go.  

 

To answer you other questions about what is taking so long, did you try the Measurement Studio 2015 beta?  They are trying, among other things, to give us an installer that allows for easy deployment to machines that don't have any NI software installed.  Previously the suggested solution was to create a Wix installer of some kind but that can be troublesome.  This new feature alone is worth the wait for me.  In the mean time, nothing is keeping you from using the latest Visual Studio environment.

 

Email me directly if you want some help with any of this.  I think all of the stuff you are waiting for is currently available.  If you are turning out 10 projects a day then it gets old having to manually add the Measurement Studio tools to each one but other then that I don't see what the big deal is.

 

 

Grant M. Johnson
Project Engineer
LECO Corporation
Message 7 of 29
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You are missing my point. I know how to make Measurement Studio work with Visual Studio by hacking the licx file. I know how to link libraries in projects. What I don't know is why NI has a problem writing extensions for Visual Studio that will make my life easier. Many other companies that are smaller than National Instruments are able to keep their products current with Visual Studio. I realize that Microsoft's products are somewhat 'moving targets' but the basic functionality of building extensions has not changed much. The problem is NI's archaic method of licensing and not being able to integrate their help system into Visual Studio's help system. The methods required for help integration have not changed significantly. Even the NetDuino team (which is open source) manages to keep their software in step with Microsoft. Maybe NI should look into moving toward open source then someone else could do the work for them.

I admit, it is not critical for me to have Measurment Studio 2015 fully integrated into Visual Studio 2015 in 2015. But for NI to take until sometime in 2015 (maybe) to become fully integrated into Visual Studio 2013 is dissapointing.

I am simply expressing my dissatisfaction with the NI development team's slow response in a very quikly maturing development environment. I can do things the hard way. I have been doing things the hard way. I don't need your help to do things the hard way. I should not have to do things the hard way.

Message 8 of 29
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Hi All,

Thank you for your active discussion on this topic. I am happy to announce that Measurement Studio 2015 is available for download!

 

NI Measurement Studio 2015 integrates into Visual Studio 2013, 2012 and 2010, includes support for .NET framework 4.5.1, new WPF user interface controls for digital and mixed graphs, and enhanced TDMS functionality. It also features a native deployment tool based on Microsoft Windows Installer distribution technology that makes it very easy to build Windows installers to deploy .NET and Visual C++ applications, including required dependencies such as NI drivers, using an intuitive user interface.

 

In addition to providing this good news, I also want to address some of the concerns brought up in this thread. In regards to Microsoft Visual Studio support, indeed this is a bit of a moving target. We certainly understand your frustration and would like to release support for new versions of Visual Studio more quickly. Measurement Studio 2015 offers support for Visual Studio 2013, but does not support Visual Studio 2015, which is now slated to release in a few weeks. We have plans to make changes to Measurement Studio that will help us better keep up with new versions. Unfortunately, these changes are a quite a bit more costly than it would seem, particularly the Visual Studio Help integration, so these changes may not come soon.

 

To help us prioritize development, I am interested in hearing more from the community on these topics. Please let me know if you are willing to be contacted directly for further discussion or would like answer these questions in this discussion thread:

 

  1. Would you be OK with CHM help if we were able to release support for new VS more quickly?
  2. Would you be OK with downloading Visual Studio integration components via Update Service to support a new version of Visual Studio instead of getting an entirely new release?
  3. Do you need to be able to use different versions of Measurement Studio with different versions of Visual Studio on the same machine?
  4. Would you be OK with us not revising assemblies to be built against new versions of the .NET framework?
  5. Would you be OK with help available only on ni.com (i.e., not installed locally)?
  6. Would you be OK with Measurement Studio being available only via download (e.g., from the Visual Studio Gallery or NuGet)?

 

It was also mentioned above that we cannot preannounce exact release dates of NI software; this is true for a variety of legal, financial and accounting reasons and is fairly consistent with many other software vendors. However, if it is critical to your design decisions to have more detailed release information, please contact me directly and we can consider whether a non-disclosure agreement might be applicable for your organization.

Thank you,

 

Anna Kozminski

Measurement Studio Marketing Manager

 

National Instruments
Message 9 of 29
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To help us prioritize development, I am interested in hearing more from the community on these topics. Please let me know if you are willing to be contacted directly for further discussion or would like answer these questions in this discussion thread:

 

  1. Would you be OK with CHM help if we were able to release support for new VS more quickly?
  2. Would you be OK with downloading Visual Studio integration components via Update Service to support a new version of Visual Studio instead of getting an entirely new release?
  3. Do you need to be able to use different versions of Measurement Studio with different versions of Visual Studio on the same machine?
  4. Would you be OK with us not revising assemblies to be built against new versions of the .NET framework?
  5. Would you be OK with help available only on ni.com (i.e., not installed locally)?
  6. Would you be OK with Measurement Studio being available only via download (e.g., from the Visual Studio Gallery or NuGet)?

 

 

Anna Kozminski

Measurement Studio Marketing Manager

 


Thank you Anna_K for your response.

I will address each of the questions you offered:

 

1. I would be willing to use a CHM file so long as the indexing and searching methods are fully supported. By that I mean that the index entry for a given function or method would reference the definition as well as brief examples using the method or function.

2. Using an update service would be fine so long as it does not remove older versions in the process. Sometimes it is necessary to use older versions in older programs and newer versions in newer programs because of NI's licensing scheme or the need to provide smaller updates.

3. I myself generally only use 2 versions of Visual Studio, the latest version and version 6 for some really old programs still used by some clients (they still work so they don't want to upgrade them to .Net because of the development costs involved).

4. This would be OK so long as you do not fall so far behind that the latest version of the .Net Framework will not work with the NI framework. Now that the .Net Framework is moving towards open-source I am not sure they will continue to keep the framework as backward compatible as they have so far. If necessary I am willing to build against older frameworks for a while.

5. This would be OK especially if I could reference help for a particular method directly from Visual Studio.

6. This would be fine so long as I can request particular versions as you can for other software using NuGet.

 

Dennis Kroger

Applications Development Manager

Stratagraph, Inc.

Lafayette, LA

Message 10 of 29
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