Use LabVIEW as backend

[discoguru]

I have just got my hands on the LabVIEW trial version. For my final year project, I believe the software will suffice.

What I want to ask is, can I use LabVIEW as a backend and build the UI with C#, Visual Basic, etc. ? If so, how do connect the two ?

(I am sorry if this question seems naive. I haven't used LabVIEW yet and I am pretty unsure about its capabilities.)

[Ray.R]

LabVIEW may suffice as a programming language.  It is probably better than Visual Basic (in my opinion).

Why do you want to use it as a backend?

Why would you want to create a UI using another language?  Unless cosmetic? LabVIEW is very good to create UI's.

But to answer your question, yes, you could build a dll and call it from other languages.  Although I'm not sure about C#.

[tst]

There are numerous ways of communicating between LV and other languages, but relatively few people use LV as a backend and it's not the kind of thing I would suggest to a novice. If you know C#, use it. If you want to learn LV, using it for everything is probably better, although there are certain things which are certainly easier to do in .NET.

Here are some options:

1. Communicate using TCP and your own custom ASCII or binary protocol.
2. Activate the VI server and call it from the .NET code.
3. Compile a DLL in LV and call it.
4. Compile a .NET interop assembly in LV and call that (only in more recent versions, never did this myself).

There are probably some other methods as well. You should be able to find info on all of these by searching the help or this site, but I would suggest focusing on more basic stuff first, such as some tutorials.

[discoguru]

Thank you.