National Instruments has announced Measurement Studio 8.6, which increases test and measurement functionality for Visual Studio 2008, the latest Microsoft development environment.

Measurement Studio 8.6 features a complete set of .Net and C++ class libraries, tools and data acquisition and instrument control driver support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC) 9.0 and the .Net Framework 3.5.

Engineers using .Net can also use Measurement Studio 8.6 to support applications with select modular instruments by building benchmark applications in Visual Studio 2008. Measurement Studio 8.6 simplifies the task of connecting to and communicating with a wide variety of instruments.

With the Measurement Studio interface, engineers can acquire data quickly from GPIB, USB, serial, Ethernet, PXI and VXI instruments using the built-in instrument I/O libraries or using built-in instrument drivers.

.Net developers have the advantage of the Technical Data Management Streaming (TDMS) .Net API that provides an efficient method to describe and store measurement data that is optimised for high-speed data streaming and postprocessing.  

With the TDMS file format, engineers can easily store properties and organise data hierarchically within a test file and quickly capture, display and stream several channels of data from devices.

The TDMS data model eliminates designing and maintaining custom file formats, and these files can also be accessed and modified easily in Visual Studio with Measurement Studio or in other analysis environments such as NI LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI and DIAdem or in spreadsheet environments such as Microsoft Excel.

Measurement Studio works with NI data acquisition (DAQ) hardware such as NI USB DAQ, Wi-Fi DAQ, Ethernet-based and PCI Express devices by providing a high-level interface for data acquisition applications.

Engineers can take advantage of built-in channel configurations for scaling raw data, high-speed waveform acquisition and generation and accurate single-point analogue and digital I/O. They can also use pulse generation, event counting and duration measurements with a counter/timer I/O in Measurement Studio 8.6.

These I/O capabilities, combined with special data types and measurement analysis class libraries, are specifically designed to obtain the data or measurement needed from physical sensors efficiently.

For more information, readers can visit www.ni.com/mstudio

Measurement Studio 8.6 priced from £349; €499

More information: www.ni.com/mstudio