Communicating between ROS and VB

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Howdy,

We have a piece of hardware that, for reasons beyond comprehension, only has Visual Basic .net or C# drivers. Assuming we can wrap the hardware drivers into Linux, we are still unsure of how we can get ROS to communicate with the VB process.

Does ROS have some kind of support for running VB programs, or is there some way to wrap a VB program into a C++ program? As a worst case, we'll probably just end up calling the program every time we need it in a node, shutting it down, and doing it all over again, but it'd be great if there were a better option.

Oh and the drivers use a proprietary protocol, so there is no way for us to just re-write the driver in C++ for Linux :-(