I have been using Labview to program user GUIs for 15 years now as a sideline to my work. I started with Labview 7 (or 6, can't remember) and saw new features being added over the years to every new release. It used to be a secret (or it seemed that way) back then that in order to avoid spagetty-code, a state machine design was a good practice. Along came then a new Labview version (again forgot which) having design patters as templates, and sure enough the state machine pattern was one of them. But then in the later releases state machines are no longer included in the templates' collection. I've always wondered why. Is NI advicing us to used other patterns instead? I still use state machines extensibly, but started looking into the others as well (specially events). I still find code written as a state machine to be the most efficient and lean, easy to mainain, document, and understand. I've had some nasty effects using events. Any one agrees?

I disagree. There is no such thing as you use state machine OR Events. All in my codes I use both of them. State machine is a programmatic concept, Events is a programming tool (sorry for the naming, English is not my first language).So it does not make sense to compare Events <--> State machines, they are not in the same category. And if you had "nasty effects" with Events, it only means you did not learn a proper use of them yet. I suggest you to have a look some more advanced desgn patterns, like a Queued State Machine (with Events), where you have a GUI loop with an Event structure and another loop where your state machine exist, and states can self-Enqueue themself, accept commands from the EVent loop, etc... Besides, I think every professional LV application using Events and specially together the Dynamic User Events we have very powerful tools to program good LabVIEW applications.I suggest you to take the Core 2-3, etc. online training, they will show you many ideas... Edit: I just opened my LabVIEW 2016 window, and clicked on "create project", and the State Machine is there, plus the more advanced templates:

LabVIEW

State machine no longer in design patterns

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I found it. Thanks

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LabVIEW

State machine no longer in design patterns

Re: State machine no longer in design patterns