Need help using NI-488.2 with C++

Question

First some background. I have an existing Windows application (written in MS Visual C++ 6.0) that essentially acts like a printer/plotter. There is a worker thread that receives data asynchronously from a serial port and writes the data to a file for later processing.
Now some of my customers want me to add a GPIB interface in addition to the serial interface. I have downloaded every document, application note, etc., from NI's site that I could find but I'm not finding enough information to help me figure out how to add the interface.
This is what I want to do (in a nutshell):
1) Application has to run on Win95/98/NT/2K/XP. This shouldn't be any problem but I thought I'd mention it.
2) Application has to run whether the
NI-488.2 device driver is loaded or not. For this reason I'll use what NI calls "direct entry" to access the GPIB-32.DLL (i.e. use LoadLibrary(), GetProcAddress(), etc.).
3) Receive GPIB data asynchronously from an NI GPIB interface board (e.g. PCI-GPIB) using a worker thread (same as I do for serial data).
The requirement as I see it is very simple - receive data asynchronously. But for the life of me I don't see any functions in the NI-488.2 API that I can use for event notification in a worker thread. It also seems like there isn't much in the way of sample code that I could find. The sample code I did find involved sending a command to a GPIB device and then reading the data back from the device.
I'm just in the research stage so I haven't installed the NI-488.2 driver or a GPIB card. No point spending money unless I can see a reasonable chance of success.
Does anybody know of some sample code, guidelines, etc., that may help me figure out how to use the NI-488.2 d
river to receive asynchronous data using a worker thread?
Thanks,
Mike

Answer 1

If file NIDevice.chm is intended for viewing by all customers, could you please move it to:
ftp://ftp.ni.com/outgoing/NIDevice.chm
A notice on machine ftp.ni.com says that as of January 23, 2004, it longer allows downloads from the incoming directory.
Domain name ftp.natinst.com doesn't seem to be accessible at all, though ftp.ni.com was accessible with the above notice.
By the way, some time ago I looked at the marketing pages for NIDevice and saw two different versions with wildly different prices (I think one cost about 20 times what the other cost). Can you say what the differences are?
Also a comment for the original poster: As a non-controller, I used ibnotify() to get a callback when the LACS bit turned on, i.e. w
hen the controller told me to listen. On speculation that the controller would really follow up that command by sending me data, my callback routine did an ibrda() and ibwait() with timeout.