Reintroducing...Darren's Weekly Nugget! 01/19/2009

[Darren]

Hey everybody!

Yesterday marked my 10 year anniversary working for NI.  As a 'thank you' to all you LabVIEW users out there who have been feeding my family all these years, I've decided to start posting weekly nuggets again.  For my first nugget of 2009, I've compiled a list of my favorite features in every major/minor LabVIEW release since I started working at NI.  In January 1999, LabVIEW 5.0.1 was the current version.  But a month or so after I started, LabVIEW 5.1 came out.  So here's a list of my favorite features since then.  Note that I program UIs a lot 😉

LabVIEW 5.1 - Save for Previous

LabVIEW 6.0 - Tab Control

LabVIEW 6.1 - Event Structure

LabVIEW 7.0 - Tree Control

LabVIEW 7.1 - Radio Buttons Control

LabVIEW 8.0 - LabVIEW Project

LabVIEW 8.2 - Auto Save for Recovery 

LabVIEW 8.5 - For Loop with Break 

LabVIEW 8.6 - Quick Drop

There were some releases where it was tough to make a decision between multiple features that I use all the time, but in terms of their value add to the LabVIEW language and editor, these are my favorites.  

-D

P.S. - Check out past nuggets here.

P.P.S. - For even more LabVIEW goodness, check out my new blog, LabVIEW Artisan.

Message Edited by Darren on 01-19-2009 11:15 AM

[tstahl]

I was expecting the undo feature, but that came out (and I had to look it up to remember) with LabVIEW 5.0.

[altenbach]

Great list! All these are near or at the top for me too. 😄

Is there an official list of all major new features for each LabVIEW release? Such a table would be great to have!

Whenever I want to find out in which version something got introduced, I end up browsing through the LabVIEW upgrade notes. I wish there was an easier way, maybe there is. 🙂

As phi said, "undo" was one of the pre-Darren highlights. 😄 (Before that, it was "think twice, wire once".)

I remember speding hours of "simulating" tab controls or radio buttons with code. The event structure had the biggest impact on my legacy programming style. Prior to the event structure, the need for polling needed to be balanced with the computational overhead of each iteration. I often had elaborate schemes in place that stored code subsection results in shift registers so only affected portions needed to be recalculated, depending on which control changed. Back in the times of 100MHz Pentium 1, 32MB RAM, I was always proud that my programs were fast and responsive even on measly hardware (by todays standards). My cell phone has more computing power than the PC of back then! Today, the hardware is so fast that we don't need to care that much about performace tweaks anymore. My dogma still is: a running VI should be at 0%CPU unless it is doing something essential. The event structure makes this much easier to implement.

Othere favorites: xcontrols, inplace elements structure, nonlinear curve fit (8.0), queues, modern controls, OOP, timed loop, ... (the list goes on forever !!!!)

New features I still typically don't use on a regular basis: express VIs, dynamic data, waveform data, ...

Of course there are things that should never have been invented, such as stacked sequences and sequence locals. They only made partial sense on the 640x480 screens of ancient history. 😄

[Pnt]

Welcome back "Darren's Weekly Nugget" !

I really missed those nuggets

[ohiofudu]

Wellcome back with your Nuggets.....and your blog LV Artisan ....

Grettings From Germany

CLAD

[kmcdevitt]

Would it not be liberating to be able to put Tabs inside Clusters in version LabVIEW 9.0.

[rolfk]

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kmcdevitt wrote:

Would it not be liberating to be able to put Tabs inside Clusters in version LabVIEW 9.0.

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Honestly I can't see the benefit of this. Tab is a strict UI element, a cluster is a strict programming element (at least for me)! I never would make a structure show on anything but a quick and dirty trial of concept UI.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[JeffBoettcher]

Kudos for starting up with your nuggets again, and for Auto Save being your favorite feature in 8.2.  🙂

Message Edited by Jeff B on 01-21-2009 09:53 AM

[tst]

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rolfk wrote:

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kmcdevitt wrote:

Would it not be liberating to be able to put Tabs inside Clusters in version LabVIEW 9.0.

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Honestly I can't see the benefit of this.

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This can be useful if you have large clusters (which sometimes are hard to avoid), even if you don't display them to the final user. Instead of having to scroll, you simply split the cluster elements into logical groupings. If such a feature was implemented, I would say that the tab control should be "invisible" in the control hierarchy.

[Wiebe@CARYA]

I really like the auto wiring feature. Since some people don't like, I'd say
that the option to put it on is a great feature!

The disable cases are great as well. Not too usefull in a finished program,
but they save me a lot of time during development.

Regards,

Wiebe.