The characteristics and shortcomings of a virtual measurement instrume nt development system (VMIDS) are analyzed. Application of the configuration tec hnology to function design of virtual instrument development system is researche d. Principles of function design based on the configuration technology, function structures based on doubledrive, data structures, network computing and reali zation of function configuration are presented. The result shows that the system adopting the above principles is easy to use and has a better openness.