Overview - Agilent Technologies 86038A User Manual

Remote Operation

Overview

Overview
This chapter will help you control an ODA from your own computer. The
chapter covers how to write your own applications, and how to control the
ODA from existing applications such as Excel and LabView.
The ODA 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 ODA from many established applications such as Visual
Basic 6.0 and VBA, as well as from .NET enabled applications such as C#.
The ODA 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 ODA, 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 ODA
user interface as a Serve 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 ODA and retrieve measurement data.
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Agilent 86038A Optical Dispersion Analyzer, Third Edition