Include the LabVIEW Task Manager in LabVIEW

[yledieu]

The LabVIEW Task Manager is an outstanding tool for debugging LabVIEW Applications. It should be included in LabVIEW in my opinion.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Many members of the community contributed to this tool, myself included. I'm glad it is helpful to you. Shipping the tool as-is would be impossible because NI does not own the code to this tool. Licensing something written by many authors and resting on top of so much communal code would be quite difficult legally.

It would be nice if LabVIEW had a tool like this built in, no question, but the scope of what would be nice to have in LabVIEW is always larger than the number of developers that we have available, so we appreciate it when the community develops useful add-ons.

If I interpret your idea as "NI should develop its own debugging tool like the LV Task Manager," that is possible but -- here's the funny thing: ideas tend to get lower priority when the community has already provided a good solution. At NI, we try to prioritize the things only NI can do because that unlocks the greatest potential for the platform as a whole. So we'll see what kind of kudos this develops, but I doubt this gains much traction in the current LabVIEW platform. In LabVIEW NXG, I have asked the team to consider a tool like this one. It might happen there in the fullness of time.

[crossrulz]

This tool is also built on a lot of other open source libraries, which NI does not want to have to depend on.  I like the spirit of the idea (a tool like LabVIEW Task Manager), but I do not see this exact tool being shipped by NI.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

crossrulz: not just "doesn't want"... it's actually "legally cannot" if we want to continue selling LV into certain markets. We could use all the OpenG tools as part of LabVIEW (e.g., we could use them as part of the Getting Started Window code, which is written all in G, or in the Task Manager if we shipped it), but we'd have to distribute the OpenG tools in a way that didn't make them available to our customers to use on their own diagrams unless they went and installed their own copy for themselves -- and that kind of "sealing up" would violate the open-source licenses of those libraries. NI has to be able to guarantee that code you write with LV's default installation doesn't put you at IP risk. It's a complicated, nasty topic... you can find a long post from me somewhere on LAVA the last time this came up and I went to the NI lawyers to get details.

*sigh* I hate IP law, even if it is critical to how I make my living.