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Part 1 of 3 of answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about Microsoft .NET, National Instruments, and the the affect of .NET on measurement and automation industry.
Table of Contents
- What is Microsoft .NET?
- What are the benefits of Microsoft .NET for measurement and automation?
- What is eXtensible Markup Language (XML)?
- What is Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)?
- What are the main components of Microsoft .NET?
- What are Experiences?
- What are Clients?
- What are Services?
- What are Servers?
- What are Tools?
What is Microsoft .NET?
Microsoft recently announced the .NET platform as their latest vision for building, deploying, and running distributed applications and systems across the Internet. The .NET platform takes advantage of several new technology standards, such as eXtended Markup Language (XML) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), to fully utilize the abundance of computing and communications resources available and in use today. With the .NET platform, Microsoft hopes to supply the next-generation user experience by providing users with more personalization and seamless integration between multiple applications and devices.
What are the benefits of Microsoft .NET for measurement and automation?
Microsoft’s goals for the .NET platform fit well into the National Instruments vision for networked measurement and automation and will thus greatly benefit the measurement and automation industry. National Instruments provides measurement and automation products that harness the power and availability of computers and the Internet so you can integrate networked measurements into your applications. Many of our products already contain features for integrating networked measurements, and we are committed to providing even more of these features in the future. Through this vision, you can expand NI-based measurement and automation applications beyond a single computer by seamlessly extending the acquisition, analysis, and presentation of data over a local network or the Internet to create distributed virtual instruments. By distributing your virtual instruments, you can publish measurement data over the Internet, take remote measurements, and distribute execution of a program.
National Instruments is closely evaluating many of the promised capabilities of the .NET platform so that we can help you improve your applications by utilizing some of these technologies.
What is eXtensible Markup Language (XML)?
The next-generation Internet will take advantage of a new data language technology called eXtensible Markup Language (XML). XML is an increasingly popular standard that has been developed through the open Internet standards groups (www.w3c.org) to provide the ability to present data and information and describe the nature of data. XML allows the same information to be consumed by multiple applications or configured appropriately within a Web browser or other display. National Instruments currently offers several products that have integrated XML features. With our test management software, National Instruments TestStand, you can generate XML-based test reports, which provide great flexibility for displaying test data in a variety of formats. For National Instruments LabVIEW and LabWindows/CVI, NI also offers an add-on Database Connectivity toolset that provides XML capabilities.
What is Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)?
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a lightweight protocol for exchanging information in a decentralized, distributed environment. Specifically, SOAP is an XML-based protocol that consists of three parts:
· An envelope that defines a framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it
· A set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined data types
· A convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses
What are the main components of Microsoft .NET?
Microsoft .NET provides the framework for the next generation of Internet-based applications. Because some of the Microsoft .NET features might be applicable to measurement and automation applications, it is important to take a closer look at the components of Microsoft .NET– Experiences, Clients, Services, Servers, and Tools–to better understand the new framework.
What are Experiences?
The Experiences component of Microsoft .NET aims to provide a more productive and purposeful experience by using XML to better organize and display data, as well as integrating digital media support and privacy-enabling technologies for management and control of personal information. In the future, new dynamic delivery systems for secure and seamless installation, updates, roaming, and offline operation will be a large part of the .NET experience. Microsoft also will offer a selection of .NET experiences including Windows .NET, MSN .NET, Office .NET, bCentral .NET, and Visual Studio .NET.
Similar to Microsoft’s goal of providing seamless user experiences within the .NET platform, National Instruments strives to integrate the most user friendly and productive experiences into our Web site–ni.com–our hardware resource manager–NI Measurement and Automation Explorer (MAX). We also integrate these experiences into our text-based language tools that make up Measurement Studio as well as our application development environments–LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI, and TestStand.
What are Clients?
Microsoft .NET Clients are “smart” devices including PCs, laptops, workstations, phones, handheld computers, Tablet PCs, game consoles, and other devices. Such .NET clients are unique because they use software that is created to enable them to operate in the .NET platform. Specifically, these smart devices allow access to your information in an appropriate form anytime and from anywhere. .NET clients consume XML Web services and provide .NET experiences by optimizing the way information is presented and gathered–from converting text to speech to recognizing handwriting, regardless of the location, type, and number of clients you use. Some of the .NET client software Microsoft will offer include Windows CE, Windows Embedded, Windows 2000, and Windows XP.
National Instruments offers you a variety of tools for use in your distributed measurement and automation systems, including LabVIEW or Measurement Studio to create browser-based applications, NI-DAQ to perform remote device access (RDA), DataSocket technology to distribute and present data over the Web, LabVIEW Real-Time for embedded deterministic applications, and FieldPoint for networked, distributed I/O. Hardware clients also are available using our PXI product line, which includes embedded controllers that you can use with the software mentioned above.
What are Services?
The .NET Services component is crucial to driving the success of the new Microsoft vision. A .NET service is a code module that can be distributed and accessed across the Internet from any platform or operating system. At the core, .NET services are software modules built for data exchange to help applications, services, and devices work together. The .NET services extend modular and component-based application development to Internet-enabled applications. The .NET services also attempt to address the integration issues of dispersed devices and applications. Because these services transfer data using the increasingly popular XML standard, they are commonly referred to as XML Web Services. You will see many general-purpose .NET services appearing over the course of the next few years. Microsoft is developing a variety of these services and also is working with other companies to create .NET services. Microsoft currently has a .NET service, called Passport, available. With Passport, developers can outsource user authentication. Microsoft is developing a user-centric set of 12 core XML Web services, codenamed HailStorm, for release in 2002.
National Instruments currently offers a variety of services available through our Web site, ni.com. These services include the Instrument Driver Network, which provides convenient access to instrument drivers. To help you determine which hardware is best suited for your application, our services include various advisors such as the Camera Advisor, DAQ Advisor, and Upgrade Advisor. In the future, NI looks forward to expanding our current Web-based services to .NET Web services that can be accessed automatically by our application development language tools, such as LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI, Measurement Studio, and TestStand.
What are Servers?
The Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers, including the Microsoft Windows 2000 server family, make up the Microsoft .NET server infrastructure for deploying, managing, and orchestrating XML Web services. Some of the existing Microsoft servers, such as SQL Server 2000 and Exchange Server 2000, have been extended to take advantage of the new .NET Framework. Microsoft also is creating several new enterprise server lines that take advantage of the .NET platform. The servers of interest to the measurement and automation industry include the Mobile Information 2001 Server for providing information to mobile devices, the BizTalk Server 2000 for integrating applications with corporate business applications, and the Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2000 for maintaining the privacy required when taking advantage of these new technologies.
What are Tools?
To take advantage of .NET capabilities, Microsoft introduces the Visual Studio .NET application development environment. Visual Studio .NET is Microsoft’s next generation development tool, built especially for developing and deploying applications that take advantage of the .NET Framework. Visual Studio .NET helps developers build XML Web services and applications using the language of their choice. Visual Studio .NET provides a choice of open, extensible, development languages. These languages include the following features:
· Object-oriented programming features in Visual Basic .NET
· Additional Visual C++ features that enable you to build .NET applications
· New Visual C# language (pronounced “C-Sharp”), which combines rapid application development (RAD) with C and C++
Related Links:
Frequently Asked Questions about Microsoft .NET - Part 2 of 3
Frequently Asked Questions about Microsoft .NET - Part 3 of 3
Microsoft's .NET website
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