National Instruments MXI-2 Reference Manual page 97

Appendix C National Instruments Software Choices
Application Development Environments
MXI-2 Configuration Reference Manual
Measurement & Automation Explorer (MAX) allows you to view your
entire T&M system and configure various components, whether they are
VXI, GPIB, PXI, DAQ, remote, or Serial devices. You can also add VME
devices to your system easily with MAX and view them on a screen display
along with the rest of your system.
MAX also features various options for running Resman. You can still
execute Resman independently to configure your instruments after a power
cycle. But you can also perform resource manager operations directly from
MAX or configure it to run Resman automatically at startup.
The NI Spy utility tracks the calls your application makes to National
Instruments T&M drivers, including NI-VXI, NI-VISA, and NI-488.2.
NI Spy helps you debug your application by clearly highlighting the
functions that return errors. You can let NI Spy keep a log of your
program's calls to these drivers so that you can check them for errors
at your convenience.
The bulk of this manual describes how to use hardware jumpers and
switches to configure your MXI-2 boards. However, you can handle a
substantial portion of your configuration task through the interactive
configuration utilities that come with NI-VISA/NI-VXI. Refer to your
getting started manual for more information about the NI-VISA/NI-VXI
software.
In addition to the NI-VISA/NI-VXI software, you can use the National
Instruments LabVIEW, Measurement Studio, and LabWindows™/CVI™
application programs and instrument drivers to ease your programming
task. These standardized programs match the modular virtual instrument
capability of VXI and can reduce your VXI/VME software development
time. These programs are fully VXIplug&play compliant and feature
extensive libraries of VXI instrument drivers written to take full advantage
of direct VXI control. LabVIEW and Measurement Studio include all the
tools needed for instrument control, data acquisition, analysis, and
presentation.
LabVIEW is an easy-to-use, graphical programming environment you can
use to acquire data from thousands of different instruments, including
IEEE 488.2 devices, VXI devices, serial devices, PLCs, and plug-in data
acquisition boards. After you have acquired raw data, you can convert it
into meaningful results using the powerful data analysis routines in
LabVIEW. LabVIEW also comes with hundreds of instrument drivers,
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