Using short laser pulses in metrological applications offers the possibility of very short observation times in combination with high accuracies. The high intensities allow for nonlinear techniques and very short pulses result in broad spectra as is necessary for white-light interferometric measurements. With respect to the demands of commercial devices the costs of the light sources had to be sufficiently low and thus new concepts had to be investigated. Therefore broadband laser pulses were generated on the one hand by gain switching of Ti:sapphire lasers. In addition, nonlinear absorbers were used for further broadening. 30 nm to 90 nm bandwidths are realized with these techniques. On the other hand, microstructured fibers are used in combination with femtosecond and picosecond pulses. The optimized compact picosecond source provided a total bandwidth of 900 nm with 2.6 W average output power in the IR and very good beam quality. These new light sources are evaluated in comparision to new CW-light sources based on diode-laser structures in different metrology techniques. In particular, the coherence radar (KoRad) technique, optical coherence tomography (OCT) and femtosecond radar (FemRad) are investigated. In addition, several prototypes of lasers and measuring devices are presented.