Whisker is a system that allows you to control a variety of devices, including levers, lights and touchscreens. To create a useful control program or behavioural task, Whisker must be instructed what to do with these devices. The program that implements a given behavioural task is known as a Whisker client.

You can write clients for Whisker using any computer language that supports TCP/IP-based networking. The two most popular such languages are Visual Basic, which is simple to use and ideal for novice programmers, and C++, which is powerful but sometimes complex.

Whisker supports both Visual Basic and C++ through its software development kit (SDK), which makes programming for Whisker easy.

Development kit for Visual Basic

Whisker includes a development kit for Microsoft Visual Basic (VB) (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic). Programming a task in VB is simply a matter of dropping a special "WhiskerClient" ActiveX control onto your project and adding the code to tell Whisker which devices to use and how to respond to events.

Development kit for C++

A client library is provided to give simple access to all of Whisker's commands from C++, making networking, device control and event handling very simple.

The VB ActiveX control uses the C++ client library internally.