Overview - Agilent Technologies 86038B User Manual

Overview

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This chapter will help you control a PDLA from your own
computer. The chapter covers how to write your own
applications, and how to control the PDLA from existing
applications such as Excel and LabView. Note that applications
for remote control can also be run on the 86038B itself, which is
useful for automated measurement procedures.
The PDLA is a remoting enabled, Microsoft .NET instrument
that can be controlled across any LAN that can serve an http
web page. The provided remote control client has an Active X
interface and a .NET interface, so you can control the PDLA
from many established applications such as Visual Basic 6.0 and
VBA, as well as from .NET enabled applications such as C#.
The PDLA uses .NET remoting as the foundation for its external
communications. Remoting is the process of programs or
components interacting across different processes or machines.
This technology provides the foundation for distributed
applications and it replaces DCOM.
In .NET remoting, the server program publishes an object on a
network channel and the client program subscribes to that
channel when loading or connecting to that object. In the case of
the PDLA, a RemoteServices object is published to an http
channel and the subscribing client program is the
RemoteClient. A Remoting server (RemoteServer) is embedded
in the PDLA user interface as a Server Activated Object. (That
is, the user interface starts the Remoting Server when the
application starts and is running when a client connects.) The
RemoteClient is a layer of abstraction, which provides
customers with an easy to use interface that provides events
and methods to control the PDLA and retrieve measurement
data.
Agilent 86038B Photonic Dispersion and Loss Analyzer, Second Edition