Release Notes

This topic presents a summary of Nimbus 7 requirements, key features, and updates, as well as some known issues to be addressed in a future update.

Nimbus 7 Releases

• 7.0.2
• 7.0.1
• 7.0.0

Migrating Projects to Nimbus 7

Nimbus 7 includes an automatic project converter that will automatically update all relevant projects in your driver solution.

See the topic Converting Driver Projects From Earlier Versions of Nimbus for details.

Earlier Releases

• Nimbus 6 Release Notes
• Nimbus 5 Release Notes

Nimbus Prerequisites

• Windows 10 or newer

• Visual Studio 2022 or Visual Studio 2026

  Any of Community, Professional, or Enterprise editions are supported.

  For Visual Studio 2026, version 18.0.0 or later is required.

  For Visual Studio 2022, version 17.14.0 or later is required.

  Important

  It is highly recommended that the latest version of Visual Studio is installed when running Nimbus. Microsoft frequently makes important updates within major Visual Studio releases and Nimbus is updated in turn to track these changes. Running earlier versions of Visual Studio can lead to faulty behavior and/or performance issues.

  Note

  The exact set of Visual Studio components and workloads required is presented in the Visual Studio Extension Manager and automatically installed when the Nimbus package is installed.

• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

  Tip

  The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 is not installed by default on Windows 10 systems. It can be installed via Control Panel -> Programs -> Programs and Features -> Turn Windows features on or off. There, check the box labeled .NET Framework 3.5 (includes .NET 2.0 and 3.0).

• IVI Shared Componenents 3.0.3 (or newer)

• IVI.NET Shared Componenents 3.0.1 (or newer)

• For drivers that use VISA for I/O communications, Nimbus 7 requires VISA Shared Components 8.0.0 and VISA.NET Shared Components 8.0.0.

  The VISA and VISA.NET Shared Components are typically installed by VISA vendor products, such as those from National Instruments or Keysight Technologies.

Key New Features and Updates

NuGet-based IVI.NET Drivers

The IVI Foundation has recently completed its work on updating the standards for IVI.NET drivers to include packaging of drivers in NuGet packages that can easily be distributed on feeds such as nuget.org. This greatly expands the usability, discoverability, and ease of distribution of IVI drivers and is the biggest step forward for IVI in many years.

Nimbus Driver Studio is the first, and only, tool that supports building NuGet-based IVI.NET drivers.

Support for .NET Core

Windows desktop development has shifted massively away from .NET Framework to .NET Core. The IVI Foundation now supports targeting .NET Core 6.0 and greater so that .NET Core client applications can finally use IVI.NET drivers.

Nimbus Driver Studio is the first, and only, tool that supports building IVI.NET drivers that target .NET Core.

Multi-Targeting .NET with a Single Codebase

While the advantages of .NET Core-based IVI drivers is clear, it is paramount that Nimbus customers have an efficient way to maintain existing IVI.NET driver inventories. Correspondingly, end users must maintain their existing .NET Framework-based systems for many years to come. For these reasons, Nimbus now supports multi-targeting in IVI.NET driver projects. This means that the same Nimbus IVI.NET driver project customers have had for years can be used to generate the same .NET Framework driver (with the same MSI-based installer it has always had) as well as an independent .NET Core driver that targets .NET 6.0 or greater. All this can be done using a single driver source code base, which greatly simplifies long-term development and maintenance.

Nimbus Driver Studio is the first, and only, tool that supports building IVI.NET drivers that multi-target .NET Framework and .NET Core from a single code base.

Known Issues

• When creating a new driver project, the option to Place solution and project in the same directory must always be chosen. Attempting to manage a Nimbus driver solution with the .sln file inside the driver project folder (or any other Nimbus project folder) could lead to unpredictable results.

• When a driver solution is opened, there are a variety of asynchronous operations that Visual Studio performs. One important operation is NuGet restore, which populates the project with all of the critical binaries and targets it needs to operate. If Driver Designer operations are attempted before the NuGet restore completes, then strange errors such as Undefined type Int32 could result.

  In practice, this is rarely an issue, as the NuGet restore typically completes within the first few seconds of opening a solution. You can see the status of the NuGet restore in the Output Window.

• IVI-COM and IVI-C help and setup projects show “broken reference” annotations (yellow warning triangles) on the icon for their project references to the driver project. These references are required for these projects to operate, and the references are indeed intact, but MSBuild currently has a bug that manifests when any custom SDK-style project references a native (C++) project. The same driver project references appear normal in IVI.NET help and setup projects.

  These warning annotations are benign and can safely be ignored.

• Merging of IVI.NET repeated capabilities is not currently supported in this release. All other aspects of IVI.NET repeated capabilities are fully implemented in this release.

• Building a driver setup project from within Visual Studio fails. Setup projects must currently be built from the command line using the MSBuild command.

• Removing nested collection-style repeated capabilities from the driver project leaves behind a driver source file and a unit test source file. These can safely be removed manually to complete the operation.

  Pacific MindWorks is working to resolve this issue in a future release.

Nimbus 7.0.2

What’s new in Nimbus 7.0.2

• Nimbus now supports Visual Studio 2026.

Issues fixed in Nimbus 7.0.2

• Fixed a bug in the IVI-COM converter where the MATLAB-related attributes were not getting removed.
• Fix a couple of NREs in the IVI.NET converter where the converter was not checking the actual driver type.
• Fix a converter bug where we were not checking for an IVI.NET driver before trying to create assembly resolvers.
• Fix a bug in the IVI.NET converter where the converter was not removing the usage of DrvierFrameworkVersionShortName from the 64-bit code in Setup.wxs.
• Fixed an issue in the IVI-COM and IVI-C converters where the properties now defined in Directory.Build.props were not getting removed from the various projects.
• Fix an issue with the definition of IVIC_ERROR_BASE that would cause error squiggles to appear on usages of the macro.

Nimbus 7.0.1

Issues fixed in Nimbus 7.0.1

• Fixed an exception that was thrown in some situations when converting drivers to Nimbus 7.
• Fixed a bug in the repeated capability editor where some of the editing buttons were disabled.

Nimbus 7.0.0

What’s new in Nimbus 7.0.0

• Nimbus 7 brings support for NuGet-based IVI.NET Core drivers recently introduced by the IVI Foundation.

See also

• Nimbus 6 Release Notes
• Nimbus 5 Release Notes