Nimbus Feature Highlights

Nimbus provides deep and seamless integration with Visual Studio, so that all phases of driver development can be accomplished without ever leaving the Visual Studio IDE.

Nimbus produces drivers that fully comply with all IVI Foundation specifications. Included in the Nimbus Class Library are pre-built implementations of all of the required IVI interfaces.

Arguably one of the most powerful features of the Nimbus product is its ability to round-trip driver implementation code. This means that decisions made about the layout of methods, interfaces, and other driver characteristics can be completely changed at any point in the development process. Nimbus automatically manipulates the C# code to effect the desired changes.

Nimbus is the only IVI driver tool that allows development of all three kinds of IVI drivers -- IVI.NET, IVI-COM and IVI-C drivers. Customers who previously struggled with the choice of whether to standardize on IVI.NET or IVI-COM or IVI-C technology canuse Nimbus to supply them all to their customers.

Nimbus provides powerful and flexible state caching and range checking features for IVI driver developers. Rather than requiring tedious coding from the developer, these features can be configured completely through intuitive dialogs and Code Wizards.

Nimbus generates a complete help file that documents all methods, properties, interfaces, and enumerations in a driver. And, it generates both a classic standalone .chm file and a set of files for integrating with the Microsoft Help Viewer. Customizable help templates allow the look, feel, and content of the driver help files to be completely controlled by the driver developer.

One of the most tedious tasks in driver development is creating and maintaining an IVI driver installer. Doing so requires intimate knowledge of not only Windows Installer technology, but also of the pages of specialized installation requirements imposed by the IVI specifications. Nimbus automatically creates a fully compliant IVI driver installer -- complete with a visual designer that allows for customizations, such as deploying sample programs.

Nimbus automatically generates a complete C# unit test that exercises every method and property in the driver. The unit test integrates directly with the Visual Studio unit testing framework so that the test-debug-edit cycle can be performed seamlessly. Nimbus roundtripping automatically updates the unit tests as methods and properties are added, removed, or renamed.

Instrument vendors commonly develop products in families of related instrument models which support very similar functionality. Rather than requiring you to develop, test, and maintain separate IVI drivers for each instrument model, Nimbus supplies a powerful array of features to facilitate multi-model driver development with no additional coding.