Chapter 9: ActiveX and Application Control

Chapter 9: ActiveX and Application Control

Brad Hedstrom

Advanced Measurements, Inc.

Overview

LabVIEW 4 and 5 for Windows includes support for ActiveX , a Windows mechanism that allows applications to manipulate each other using a specific type of messaging. In keeping with the pace of change in the software industry, ActiveX was formerly called OLE Automation , which in turn was formerly called Object Linking and Embedding . In this chapter, we will use the term ActiveX, but don?t be surprised if you see the other terms used synonymously. To get started, read National Instruments Application Note 081, Using OLE Automation in LabVIEW. ¹ It provides a good overall introduction to ActiveX.


	1	Available from the http://www.natinst.com or the Instrupedia CD-ROM.

LabVIEW 5 adds a feature called the VI Server . This allows LabVIEW to expose many of its capabilities (through methods and properties ) to other applications. These other applications could be other LabVIEW applications running on the local machine or on a remote machine, or they could be developed in other environments (VisualBasic, Visual C ++ , Excel, etc.). The VI Server is platform independent, using TCP/IP, in contrast to ActiveX, which is currently restricted to 32-bit Windows 95 and NT. While this chapter concentrates on ActiveX, the VI Server is not exclusive to ActiveX and thus the final section applies to LabVIEW running on all platforms. The programming model used for the VI Server is very similar to that of ActiveX, and...

< Previous Excerpt Next Excerpt >

Purchase This Book

LabVIEW POWER Programming

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 9: ActiveX and Application Control

Contact Preferences

This is embarrasing...

Customize Your GlobalSpec Experience

Select Your Free Newsletters

Industry Newsletters

Select Your Free Product Alerts

This is embarrasing...