A mechanism for transparently identifying and retrieving an instrument driver to an application development environment tat is associated with a user-selected instrument is disclosed. Following a user selection of an instrument through a user interface generated by the application development environment, an instrument driver associated with the selected instrument is programmatically identified. If the required instrument driver for the selected instrument is missing from the application development environment, an embodiment of the present invention retrieves the instrument driver from a remote location and installs the instrument driver in the application development environment without the involvement of the user. The present invention also generates a user interface from the application development environment which enables a user to see currently installed instrument drivers as well as available instrument drivers that are located both locally and remotely.