Cool new LabVIEW features - VI Snippets

[Joe Ross]

Next year, LabVIEW is being updated to LabVIEW 2011. The previous version of LabVIEW for FRC was version 8.6, released in 2008. There have been a lot of neat features released in LabVIEW in the last 3 years. I intend to highlight several of these features that I think are relevant to FIRST. Look for more posts in the upcoming months.



Have you ever tried to ask for help with LabVIEW code on chiefdelphi? You could either post a screenshot of the code, and hope that all the relevant parts are visible (not easy if there are a lot of case statements) or you could post the vi, and hope that people have LabVIEW available to open the file to help you.

Now, there is a tool called VI Snippets. It is a PNG image of your code, that also contains the code itself. You can look at the picture, or you can import it to LabVIEW by just dragging and dropping. It makes it really easy to share code. I've attached an example of a VI Snippet. You can read more about VI Snippets on the NI website. http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/9330

[SuperS_5]

I assumed that this years version will be based on LV2010. There are a few important differences between LV2010 and LV2011. I use both in my day job, and some of the features are very useful. You may want to refrain from mentioning too many features from LV2011 to prevent confusion. The biggest "feature" of LV2011 is stability. There was a lot of bug fixes, and hopefully the FRC version has many of these fixes ported over.

As for my most favorite feature:
Separated compiled code from source. This pulls the compiled binary code out of the VI file, and saves it to the user directory. When something like a typedef is changed, all VIs that use it will be recompiled, even if the source of that VI is not actually changed. This causes trouble for source control systems that don't know the difference between the different parts of a VI. With this new option, the VI file no longer changes on recompile only updates, fixing the problem with the source control systems. (It can it can be turned on by default for new VIs in the LabVIEW INI file.) This makes using SVN/GIT/Mercurial/ETC. actually productive.
(PS. SVN 1.7 was just released, bringing huge improvements.)

[Joe Ross]

Originally Posted by SuperS_5

I assumed that this years version will be based on LV2010. There are a few important differences between LV2010 and LV2011. I use both in my day job, and some of the features are very useful. You may want to refrain from mentioning too many features from LV2011 to prevent confusion. The biggest "feature" of LV2011 is stability. There was a lot of bug fixes, and hopefully the FRC version has many of these fixes ported over.

I had expected LV2010 also. However, beta teams were provided LV2011.

[SuperS_5]

Awesome! This is good news. LV2010 is great except for the not so occasional crash.