Out in Front: January 4, 1996

National Instruments has introduced ComponentWorks, a package of add-on control, display, and analysis libraries that you can use to enhance or customize Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C/C++ for data acquisition. The package is the first data-acquisition product to support a new 32-bit Microsoft technology, called the OLE (object-linking-and-embedding) custom control, or OCX. OCXs, which work with 32-bit versions of Visual Basic and Visual C/C++ running under Windows 95, feature pop-up property sheets that simplify configuring hardware and constructing virtual-instrument displays in data-acquisition applications. Until now, data-acquisition enhancements for Visual Basic and Visual C/C++ have used 16-bit Visual Basic Extension (VBX) technology.

National Instruments is aiming ComponentWorks at experimenters who develop data-acquisition applications mainly for their own use and are not serious programmers. Visual Basic’s lack of data-acquisition-specific capabilities has handicapped such users. ComponentWorks helps these users by supplying tools for controlling plug-in data-acquisition hardware; for controlling external instruments, many of which interface to the PC via the IEEE-488 bus; for analysis, including filtering signals and calculating FFTs and power spectra; and for user-interface development. The base version of ComponentWorks costs $495; a full development version costs $895.
-- by Dan Strassberg

National Instruments, Austin, TX. (512) 794-0100.