National Instruments announced Measurement Studio 8.5 to add test and measurement functionality to the latest Microsoft development environment with a complete set of .NET class libraries, tools and NI data acquisition driver support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. Measurement Studio 8.5 includes ASP.NET AJAX-compatible user interface controls and advanced network variable communication functions for creating highly responsive remote monitoring Web applications. Because the development environment is no longer tied to a specific version of the .NET framework, engineers can now reduce deployment costs by adding functionality to existing projects without having to upgrade to a new .NET framework on deployed systems. Engineers can also now add data acquisition functionality to their Web and Windows projects with the newly introduced NI-DAQmx driver support for Visual Studio 2008.

With ASP.NET AJAX compatibility and improved network variable functionality available in the Measurement Studio ASP.NET Web Forms controls, engineers can create responsive Web pages to be viewed from Web-enabled devices such as PDAs; smart phones; and Linux, Mac OS or Windows machines. By using Measurement Studio ASP.NET scientific controls along with Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX server controls, engineers can reduce the amount of data that is transferred between the client and server and improve the performance of a Web application displaying data from dynamic sources, such as that from data acquisition devices, benchtop instruments and distributed I/O systems or databases. Network variables publish or subscribe to measurement data acquired from these dynamic sources. Engineers can now programmatically create, discover and browse to network variables; detect connection failures; and flush network variable buffers to optimize performance.

The new version of Measurement Studio supports the latest NI-DAQmx and NI-SCOPE .NET drivers, which include memory-optimized analog waveform read operations that reuse memory allocated in previous analog waveform functions and improve the performance of applications acquiring large amounts of data. Engineers can decrease their application development time by downloading from more than 100 ready-to-run text-based, data acquisition examples on www.ni.com. Measurement Studio 8.5 also features more analysis methods, including pulse and transition measurements, and additional ready-to-run analysis example code. Engineers can further reduce development time by copying example code snippets for more than 120 advanced analysis functions directly into their applications.

Measurement Studio continues to add test and measurement functionality to Microsoft Visual Studio. With integration into Visual Studio 2008, in addition to continued legacy support for Visual Studio 6.0, engineers can now create Windows and Web Forms applications that take advantage of the latest .NET framework.