.NET support

[artkolisnyk]

Hello and thank you for your work on this project. Looking through code I stumbled upon proto files for gRPC that featured csharp_namespace option. Is .NET support planned in the future? Is there a way to make this library work with .NET currently?

[zhindes]

DAQmx already has .NET bindings available for .NET Framework 4.0 and 4.5 (which is compatible with all future .NET Framework versions). Those assemblies also work in .NET Core, but we do plan to make official .NET Core support in the future as well.

• Using NI-DAQmx in Text Based Programming Environments
• NI-DAQmx .NET Class Library Help

[artkolisnyk]

Hello @zhindes, thanks for the prompt reply. Yes, we have used SDKs for .NET Framework and they work great. Looking forward to the official .NET Core support.

In our new project we were considering deploying the code in Docker on Linux and utilizing gRPC as a communication protocol. And after discovering this library, we were thinking about adapting some logic to .NET since it is our main technology stack.

[zhindes]

Ah, ok. grpc-device is our open source server and proto files for many NI driver APIs (DAQmx included). Your .NET client code could use gRPC to communicate with that server and accomplish what you want. You won't be using the DAQ .NET Assembly APIs directly, but rather the gRPC API we created. That is much more similar to the lower level C API, but conceptually it is similar to DAQ Python/.NET APIs.

[artkolisnyk]

Many thanks @zhindes, this is exactly what we need.

[artkolisnyk]

Hello @zhindes, sorry to bother you again, but do you know if there is a possibility to run gRPC server from grpc-device in a Docker container? What device and volume mappings would be required for that?

[zhindes]

Sadly, no. grpc-device requires the ability to talk to the hardware directly via an NI driver API. None of our hardware devices are supported in a container. You could run the client code in a container, though.