Technical data

78 Agilent Connectivity Guide
4 Connecting Instruments to USB
You can change this VISA alias name to one of your own choosing
before clicking OK.
Using VISA aliases in your programs, rather than VISA addresses,
provides two significant advantages:
• Portability. If you program using aliases, you can run your program
on a new test system, whose instruments are at different addresses,
simply by using Connection Expert to create the same aliases on the
new system as you created on your development system. Similarly,
you can move or replace instruments without changing or
recompiling test code, simply by changing the alias definitions in
Connection Expert.
• Readability. Your programs will be much easier to read and
understand if, for example, your multimeter is called “myDMM”
instead of “GPIB2::14::8::INSTR”. This is particularly important in
the case of USB instruments, whose VISA addresses are typically
long and cumbersome, containing the instrument's serial number
among other information.
NOTE
A VISA alias is a name of your choosing, which you assign to a device
and use in your programs. Once assigned, the alias is a synonym for the
device's VISA address, so you can use it to open a VISA session (using
the viOpen function) and to get resource information (using
viParseRsrc or viParseRsrcEx).