Reasons to Upgrade from 6.0 to 8.5

[jmpugh]

Hello!

My company has another plant that is currently using LabVIEW 6.0 and they have shown interest in upgrading to version 8.5, which is the version we use at our plant.  They are visiting to check out 8.5 and I was just curious of what all you gain from going from 6.0 to 8.5.  I started LabVIEW coding when 8.0 just came out, so I have near zero experience with LabVIEW 6.0 and I'm sure the question will come up "What's different?"

Would anybody mind posting just a few of the major improvement and some issues they might have doing this upgrade ? I know if they are using any DAQ cards they will probably want to do some re-coding in DAQmx.  Thanks! 

Message Edited by jmpugh on 01-17-2008 09:52 AM

[johnsold]

The event structure was introduced after LV6.0 If any of their programs have user interfaces, that alone may be worth the upgrade.

Many performance improvements.

Express VIs. (Well, maybe that is an advantage and maybe not!)

Lynn

[tbob]

6.0 does not have the project explorer.  This helps to keep all subvi's and other files together for a total project.  I agree with Lynn that the event structure alone is worth the upgrade.  Another thing that 8.5 has that 6.0 don't is the disable structure.  Also the flat sequence structure.  I'm sure there are performance reasons also, better memory management, better array handling. better file handling.  Lots of things too numerous to mention here.  NI's website contains a document that shows what is new in each upgrade.  You can search for it at ni.com.  One more came to mind, breaking out of a For loop.

[Ben]

A read of all of the update and release notes will show a lot of the changes.

Bug fixes are a good reason.

THere were a lot of bugs in grpahs and charts that got fixed,

Bugs in bundling by names was another really nasty bug,

and oh yes the really nasty bug was that LV could under the right circumstances mix-up file references leading to files A's dat being written to file B. And when the two files were datalog files of differnet formats, LV could crash trying to read the corrupted file.

Ben

[Albert.Geven]

I'm even going to like the project management especially for lvlib instrumentdrivers

[vt92]

If you do any code sharing at all, you will want to use a common version.  There are numerous improvements from 6.0 to 8.5 that would make it worthwhile.

[Ben]

"If you do any code sharing at all, you will want to use a common version. "

I think that is the best reason yet given!

Ben

[Wiebe@CARYA]

For me, the added development features has speed up my development.

The auto tool selection reduced my wrist pain a lot, and makes it a lot
faster for me to develop code. I'd say I'm developing in about 80% of what
it used to be.

The code recovery when there is an incidental crash saved me a few times.
Let's say it saved me 6 hours of work by now.

The event structure makes it possible to separate parts of the code, and
this brings more structure to the programs. Don't know how much time this
has saved us, but it's a lot.

If you are using RT or FPGA, the project explorer is going to save a you a
lot of time. (FPGA is out of the question all together in 6.0).

I think in 6.0, the control references are not there jet. This might save a
lot of time. In 7> you can put a lot of UI in sub vi's, and reuse it in the
same project, or between projects. The difference between a copy of a vi, in
stead of a copy of the code is huge, especially when you need to fix it when
it's used 40 times.

A less obvious reason to switch is you'll run behind in support. Not only
NI's support, but also this forum. All posted examples are in 8.2 or 8.5
nowadays. There are less and less people that are capable of sending you a
VI in 6.0.

On the down side, you do need more hardware resources to run 8>. Any modern
pc will do though.

Regards,

Wiebe.

[parthabe]

Event Structure

Project Explorer

For loop break option, like in C

In Place Element Structure

Digital Graph Property enhancements

Rt-click custom short-cut menu, instead of coding seperately for it

Multicore Processor support

& definitely many more... !

[parthabe]

Forgot to mention...

Correct working of the built-in Source Code Control option when used in tandem with MS VSS [I dont know about other tools].