A technique for remote management of instrumentation based on Web Service

In the paper the authors propose an original solution to perform the remote control of measurement instrumentation, with the aim of realizing the experimental section of an E-Learning portal of Electrical and Electronic Measurement courses, based on Web Services implemented in Visual Basic.Net. The .Net technology proves to overcome drawbacks typically affecting most of the techniques for remote instrument control till now adopted, allowing, at the same time, the integration among different softwares and communication protocols and the connection to measurement stations only by means of a common browser. Web Services use, in fact, XML language, that is well understood by each program, and SOAP protocol, which is recognized by any software environment supporting communication over Internet. Details of the implemented Web Service are given in the following, focusing the attention on the utilities provided by Visual Basic.Net for the management of connections (as queuing procedure, reading of UDDI registry, polling of the administered servers) and implementation an E-Learning portal.