Specifications

5
From the National Instruments (NI) webpage (http://www.ni.com/visa/):
“VISA provides the programming interface between the hardware and
development environments such as LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI, and
Measurement Studio for Microsoft Visual Studio
®
. NI-VISA™ is the National
Instruments implementation of the VISA I/O standard.
NI-VISA™ includes software libraries, interactive utilities such as NI Spy
and the VISA Interactive Control, and configuration programs through
Measurement and Automation Explorer for all your development needs.
NI-VISA is standard across the National Instruments product line. With
NI-VISA, you can feel confident that your software development will not
become obsolete as your instrumentation interface hardware needs evolve
into the future.”
National Instruments (NI) provides the VISA libraries free of charge. You are
eligible for a ‘free’ deployment license when you download the VISA libraries for
use with an application written using NI software.
Agilent Technologies also offers VISA-C and VISA-COM drivers with the Agilent
IO Library Suite. Both the NI and Agilent VISA implementations cover the core
VISA specifications and include extensions to interface with NI or Agilent hard-
ware. NI and Agilent VISA libraries can be installed on the same computer, but
only one vendor’s libraries will be referenced by the VISA-COM API.