WCF web services with LabVIEW

On a recent project with LabVIEW, I was tasked with integrating a C# DLL into a LabVIEW application. The integration worked quite well and allowed us to integrate client generated code with the exising LabVIEW application.

As the application has evolved, it makes sense to separate the .NET code completely from the LabVIEW code. The initial thought was to use WCF Web Services to do the heavy lifting and use the web services import functionality in LabVIEW. Unfortunately, the import functonality (as of LabVIEW 2010 SP1) was created prior to WCF. This means that WCF is not directly supported as a web service using the import tool.

It is still possible to integrate WCF into LabVIEW but it requires that a.NET DLL be created as a proxy class. This winds up using the same methodology as the native LabVIEW importer uses but does not have the tight integration of having a set of VIs created that can just be dropped into your LabVIEw application.

In the end, manually creating a .NET DLL to replace a .NET DLL did not make sense for the application and we chose to implement a custom communications framework that seamlessly transmits LabVIEW clusters to C# classes with minimal configuration.

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