Nimbus is the only commercially available product that supports the development of native IVI-COM drivers. IVI-COM drivers are crucial for offering the broadest ADE support to users. IVI-COM drivers are natively supported in environments ranging from LabVIEW and MATLAB to Visual C# and Visual Basic.

Users working in .NET languages, such as C# and Visual Basic.NET, require special drivers for .NET. The IVI specifications prescribe how these must be built and named and deployed. To work properly, these .NET drivers must integrate with the .NET shared components shipped by the IVI Foundation. There are specific versioning requirements when working with drivers in .NET and special documentation files that must be emitted to support features such as IntelliSense. Nimbus is the only package available that automatically creates these fully compliant .NET wrappers.

Nimbus is the only driver development product that supports the creation of both IVI-COM and IVI-C drivers -- and from a single source code base, which greatly simplifies development and maintenance. With tools such as LabWindows/CVI, you're forced to choose between IVI-COM and IVI-C. With Nimbus, you can stop debating and support every ADE with your driver.

With a single check box, Nimbus produces a complete MATLAB driver that exposes the same functionality as the underlying IVI-COM driver. The MATLAB wrapper is integrated with the driver installer so that MATLAB users feel as if they were working with native MATLAB objects.

Nimbus allows you to produce a complete, customer-ready driver using a single Visual Studio solution. The solution houses all of the code for the driver, the help files, the installer, and the unit tests.

Visual Studio is a boon for third-party developer tools as it provides an unprecedented level of customization possibilities. Nimbus fully capitalizes on Visual Studio .NET by integrating our own custom tool windows, menus, commands, and toolbars directly into the Visual Studio IDE. Driver developers working within Visual Studio have direct access to the same Nimbus design and development tools as in the stand-alone Nimbus Driver Designer. In fact, all phases of driver design, development, and test can be conducted without ever leaving the Visual Studio IDE.

Arguably one of the most powerful features of the Nimbus product is its ability to round-trip driver implementation code. This means that decisions made about the layout of methods, interfaces, and other driver characteristics can be completely changed after the driver has been generated and after the developer has begun implementation. Nimbus Code Wizards automatically manipulate the C++ code to effect the desired changes. All implementation code is preserved in the process! No other driver development tool on the market today has this capability. Driver developers today facing significant design changes must make painstaking modifications to the code by hand. This is so tedious and error-prone as to be prohibitive. Developers working with other tools have reported completely regenerating their driver from scratch three or more times per day simply to accommodate design changes.

With a single mouse-click, Nimbus can be instructed to automatically add the IVI-defined interfaces for LXI instrumentation. Class A, Class B, and Class C options are available to include just the right amount of LXI support in your driver.

Nimbus-generated driver help files are the richest, most professional looking help files in the industry. Nimbus ships with pre-built help templates that allow you to mimic the look and feel of the Microsoft help systems. Or you can incorporate custom styling and branding with images, media, and other arbitrary HTML content.

These rich help files are made possible by a full featured HTML editor integrated right into Nimbus. For each method or property, you can enter rich content, link to other pages or website and develop help content using features typically found only in specialized help authoring products.

The IVI specifications describing how installers must be built is more than 50 pages of detailed requirements. Nimbus generates a fully compliant IVI driver installer automatically -- with no effort required of the driver developer. To customize the installer, such as for deploying example programs or changing items in the Start Menu, Nimbus offers a graphical installer editor where customizations can be done with simple drag-n-drop operations. There's no need for expensive and complicated installer packages such as InstallShield or Wise.

Nimbus online help integrates directly with Visual Studio. Standard F1-Help provides quick access to the extensive Nimbus driver library.

The Nimbus help system is fully integrated with the native VS.NET Dynamic Help system. As you type code and navigate within a driver, Visual Studio will direct you to important Nimbus Help topics.

Old-style Help format (.chm files). With only this style of help, customers using the driver will not be able to use F1-Help (context-sensitive) or Dynamic Help when building applications in Visual Studio.

New-style Help format that exactly mimics MSDN online Help. This style of Help is required for F1-Help and Dynamic Help.

Nimbus drivers requires no runtime DLLs, while LabWindows drivers must be shipped to each customer with additional LabWindows-specific components. As a result, Nimbus drivers do not suffer from the all-too-familiar "DLL hell" problems that plague drivers with dependencies on runtime components.

Instrument vendors commonly develop products in families of related instrument models. Often, instrument models within a family support very similar functionality. Rather than developing, testing, and maintaining separate IVI drivers for each instrument model, it is far simpler to develop a single driver than can support multiple instrument models and families.

Multi-model drivers necessarily place a much greater implementation burden on the driver developer. Nimbus supplies a powerful array of features to facilitate multi-model driver development with no additional coding. At runtime, the Nimbus-generated driver detects the instrument to which it is connected and dynamically adapts to issue the proper device commands for that specific instrument model. The driver developer uses simple dialog boxes to configure this behavior. All of these dialogs are accessible from the Nimbus Driver Designer and from within Visual Studio.

Many types of instruments today ship with lots of configurable options. Customers purchase a base instrument and then purchase additional options in the form of measurement personalities that can be downloaded into the instrument. As a result, the capability of the instrument, and hence, the driver that communicates with it, needs to be configurable and expandable. As new measurement options are developed and released, the existing driver needs to be able to accommodate these options even though they did not exist when the driver was developed.

Nimbus provides direct support for these types of compound instruments. Supporting instruments with downloadable personalities is as easy as selecting an option in the New Driver Project Wizard. The Nimbus-generated driver dynamically adapts to expose only the options installed on the end-user instrument.

Help 2.0 is the current format for accessing help in Visual Studio. Nimbus drivers integrate directly with the Visual Studio help system, so that end users can directly access help from within the Visual Studio environment. Driver help topics appear in the same Visual Studio help collection as the native Visual Studio content and alongside other IVI drivers. When users need to access the help page for a specific method or property, they merely put the cursor on the method in their code and hit the F1 key. Nimbus drivers are the only drivers that offer this level of seamless help access from within Visual Studio.

Nimbus automatically generates a complete C# unit test that exercises every method and property in the driver. The unit test integrates directly with the Visual Studio IDE so that the test-debug-edit cycle can be performed seamlessly. Nimbus roundtripping automatically updates the unit tests as methods and properties are added, removed, or renamed.