LabVIEW Idea Exchange

Hi all LabVIEW fellows and users,

I know this has been asked many many times but one more might still help getting it.

Everybody agrees to say that today LabVIEW has became a great general purpose programming environment not only dedicated to test, measurement, instrument control or data analysis but able to manage virtualy any kind of requirement which is very cool for us LabVIEW programmers.

However, to my opinion one thing is still slowing down the use and spread of LabVIEW for developping general purpose applications that is the HUGE SIZE of its run-time engine!!! An average executable size for an application ranges from 1mb or less to 10 or 20 mb for quite large applications. The run-time for being able to execute it is at the very least 10 to 20 times larger which makes it very difficult to release over the internet.

I recently created a small application that monitors the state of the caps and num lock key and indicate the state with a tray icon since my computer is not equiped with those LEDs. I know some other users would appreciate to have that little piece of code since they might experience the same problems I had. How can I explain them that the application and installer is about 200 MB for such a tiny little piece of code? Don't you think people might believe that the proposed application is stuffed with malwares of that there is a BIG probleme with it?

Please dear NI decision makers make LabVIEW a "real" general purpose developping environement by adjusting the installer size to only what is required for the application, the whole community would appreciate so much at least make this option selectable.

Hope this will be listened.

Best Regards,

Brice

Recently DMC developed a high speed vision inspection system using LabVIEW. This system inspects many different parts and each part requires different inspection criteria, so we needed to develop a user interface (UI) that could be used to configure the current products, as well as be flexible enough to configure new products.

The manufacturing machine was already running on a Windows CE device, so our UI would need to interface with the UI already on the system and run on Windows CE. For a faster development time we decided to go with C# .NET for Windows CE. Unfortunately, the .NET library and functionality for Windows CE is far less capable than the standard .NET library.

The Windows CE library was sufficient for most of our needs, but there were two areas that proved fairly difficult. The first difficult item was obtaining and decoding the custom TCP messages that contained the images and inspection results from the LabVIEW Embedded Vision System that was running the vision inspection. However, after spending some time encoding and decoding the images, the UI was able to access full-sized images from the inspection system.
The next difficulty was that once these images were on the UI we needed to be able to zoom, pan, and draw inspection areas on the image. In a full .NET library this would have been really simple, but for a Windows CE device it required some custom work. The first step was to create a custom control and place just a picture box inside. Additionally, I set the SizeMode to StretchImage. By having the image take up whatever size the picture box was, I was able to zoom by increasing/decreasing the size of the picture box. Additionally, I was able to pan by moving the picture box relative to the custom control.

I have included all of the back-end code that I used to make the image behave as I wanted. The code I had was significantly more complicated, as I needed to be able to draw and pan rectangles that were used for inspection zones. I tried to remove all of that code to make the items I am explaining more clear; however, if anything seems odd, it is likely a remaining piece of the old code. If anyone is interested in the rectangle drawing code I would be happy to provide more information. Here is a link to the simplified code:

http://www.dmcinfo.com/Blog/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/664/Image-Manipulation-in-Windows-CE-or-Mobile-using-VS-NET.aspx