New .NET Driver Specifications (for .NET 6+)
13 Feb 2025 - IVI Admin
In January the IVI Foundation completed work on a new generation of lighter-weight driver specifications. These new specifications align the IVI driver standards with common customer expectations around driver capability, while retaining the IVI Requirements for:
- Testing - to ensure high quality drivers
- Documentation - to ensure that driver users have access to documentation necessary to successfully use the driver
- Source code - to enable customers to update and enhance drivers on their own
Generation 2026 describes the new IVI Driver Generation.
These new standards take the form of a IVI Driver Core Specification that can bear on a number of driver languages, and language-specific standards, such as the IVI Driver .NET Specification that has specific requirements for .NET IVI drivers and broadens the IVI support to both newer .NET 6+ (.NET Core) drivers in addition to .NET Framework.
The new standards have less extensive requirements to facilitate instrument interchangeability, although these may be added in the future. The new standards retain the features critical for most scenarios. IVI is continuing to provide Shared Components that driver developers and users can use that want to use the earlier IVI Driver architecture to interchange instruments.
The IVI Driver Core Specification describes requirements common to all IVI Core Drivers, regardless of implementation language. IVI provides additional specifications that detail the requirements of drivers for specific programming languages.
With the development of these specification, the IVI Foundation has begun a transition to managing the specifications under GitHub. We believe this will help make the standards more accessible to driver users that want to propose additions, and also make the standards themselves more flexible. Driver users and developers are encouraged to participate by creating discussions on GitHub.