LabVIEW Should Support .NET 4 Constructors and Methods

[RobCole]

Now that .NET 4 is out and people are using it to program, LabVIEW should support the .NET 4 framework. LabVIEW needs to stay on top of the game and make it easy to use all the latest technology. Especially something as widely adopted as .NET.

Currently, no version of LabVIEW (released or in Beta) supports .NET 4.

[JackDunaway]

The LabVIEW Beta comes with a NDA, so nobody knows whether or not the Beta has the new .NET framework support. But I agree with the Idea that LabVIEW should pace .NET development fairly closely.

[RobCole]

After discussing work arounds with NI Support, this inability to use .NET 4 .dll files has been given CAR #221992. I have been told that it will likely be in future versions of LabVIEW.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Having been burned in the past by subtle but significant differences between a MS beta and an MS release, my bet is that future LV releases will always lag the .NET release. .NET 4 just released last week, so I wouldn't expect to see LV support for it until LV 2011. I am not saying this with any authority -- I don't actually keep abreast of what the LV-NET folks are working on, but trying to release synchronously by testing against the pre-release version is something LV is generally reluctant to do. And since LV 2010 is already deep into beta, I doubt that the support will be there. It *might* be, but in general, I wouldn't expect any given LV version to support any given .NET version unless the .NET version was released when the LV version started development cycle.

[RobCole]

Thank you for that information.

For anyone who is following this, we have a work-around for this (thank you to NI support for helping us work this out) and I'll put the information here so others can use it.

LabVIEW .dll access and callbacks work for .NET Framwork 3.5.

Within a C# solution (we are using Visual Web Developer 2010),  right click on a project and select "Properties"

Set the Target framework to be .NET Framework 3.5 (do this for any C#  Class Library that LabVIEW will be accessing and any class library that THIS class library will access).

Class libraries and Windows applications that call the .NET Framework 3.5 .dlls should then be set to .NET Framework 4 Client Profile.

If you leave it set to .NET Framework 4, all .dlls that this project calls will be compiled to .NET 4.  If set to .NET Framework 4 Client Profile, each individual project within the solution will be compiled to the framework that was specified for that project.

.NET Framework 4 compiled code can call methods from .NET 2, 3, and 3.5 class libraries. But not vice versa. You can not use a method from a class library compiled in a higher version.

So, we have divided out our class libraries so that anything that LabVIEW needs to access is in a class library in .NET 3.5.

Message Edited by Robert Cole on 04-26-2010 10:22 AM

[msstephe]

Thank you for the work around. I'm trying to evaluate the best solution for our issue with LabVIEW and .NET 4.0 support. Will CAR #221992 be incorporated in the 2011 realease of LabVIEW? When is the 2011 released scheduled to happen? Thanks.