[JDNovak]

Hi Joe,
Good to hear youre back.
SmartDashboard is an addition to WPILib for C++ (and Java?). The previous options for troubleshooting were to printf to the console output of the Crio or a modified printf function that was created for the first generation operator console. The first year of the Crio era used a blue Linux box made by Quickbyte for the driver station and a print function was created to send output to its display. It was limited to about 8 lines of 20 characters.
For 2010 FIRST decided to change to using a laptop PC originally made by Intel called a Classmate PC. The Driver station software is actually two parts. The unchangeable part handles Joystick and digital/analog I/O input and communicates with the Crio. This part also supports displaying the limited print function from the QuickByte console. The second part is an open Labview application that can display the Crio I/O and a camera stream. this application can be cutomized or removed. It is best used with Labview on the Crio.
Smartdashboard was created last year to replace this Labview screen with a window that supports output from C++ code without worrying about formatting on the Crio side. It consists of a class in WPILib that allows sending several types of data from anywhere in the program along with an ID string for each. All these prints are added in the stream back to the Dashboard PC. On the PC side, the Labview application is replaced with a Java app that opens a blank window. When the Crio starts to execute, the stream of data sent shows up in the window as the ID string, data. Initially the order is random. the user can drag the data around the window to organize it and the result can be saved. After this, the layout can be restored each time the system boots. there are several display formats available including plotting the data with no change to the sending program.
Hope this makes enough sense to get started. There is a Sourceforge project for this as well as a couple of other team created dashboards. You can get to them from the Kit of Parts website / C++ support. There are some posts about it on the usfirst forum also.
Look for a beta test team around you soon to find out if anything is changing for next year.
Good luck and again, welcome back! I still owe you for the Dewalt development. We have some form of them almost every year since 2005.