What's Your Favorite Version of Labview?

[Yamaeda]

For all the features and stuff i prefer the latest, but from a startup time perspective i prefer my oldest ... Currently i'm mostly using 2019 and it's a good compromise. But as another post reminded me, 2020 or 2021 for having Interfaces is a solid choice.

[Kevin_Price]

My fave is LV 2020 -- conversion to 64-bit went much smoother than anticipated.  Also 2020 was a golden era when could get a permanent license at a much less egregious price.   

Back then I still entertained thoughts of doing occasional post-retirement consulting projects, amortizing the cost over a handful of projects and several years.   But that got thwarted -- first by the subscription model, then by the new permanent license costs that have doubled or more.   Looks like I'll be quitting cold turkey when that day comes.  It was nice while it lasted...

-Kevin P

[Jay14159265]

+1 for LV2020. The low value of versions after LV2020 makes them a no go for me. 

[billko]

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@rolfk wrote:

I hated NXG with a vengeance. Never been a fan of MDI applications, way to constrained and I have a dual monitor system for a reason and don’t like my IDE to constrain me to one window. Yes, I use Visual Studio too, but always have to kick my ass to get over the initial contempt.

7.1.1 was for a long time my main version until I started to move to the newer project window around 2011.

8.0 was a drama, but I did use 8.2.1, 8.5.1 and 8.6.1 a few times for cRIO work as the real-time capabilities in 7.1.1 were very cumbersome.

After 2011 I worked in most versions, usually after the SP1 release got available. Main use was in 2013. 2016, 2017 and 2019. But it depended always on projects. The LabVIEW version was generally chosen at the start of a project on the base which was the latest SP1 version and never changed during the course of a project unless there was a very compelling reason to do so, such as unsupported or buggy supported hardware in the older version. Most times projects stayed in the original version even when they were maintained many years later.

Currently I have standardized on 2020 for most projects and 2018 for projects that involve old legacy cRIOs. Toolkits I release in 8.6, if it doesn’t need newer features, because that is the first version where I have a Linux installation available and also the first to support 64-bit configurations in the Call Library Node despite that the first official release of LabVIEW 64-bit is 2009.

I’m considering to move to 2025 at some point but need to test a few things until then and feel absolutely no FOMO about it. 😀

As to upgrading from 2018 to 2025, unless you have a very nasty application that uses lots of weird to outright evil hardware, I see no reason to do that in multiple steps. Maybe if you need to be compatible with your supplier or client who is not going to upgrade to the latest and greatest for some reason, it could make sense to go in steps, but generally I would in that case refrain from going beyond the version you try to be compatible with, except for some tests to see if you have compatibility problems. But I would never maintain the code in the newer version. One of the worst things you can do is to have diverging versions of your code. That is NEVER gonna be merged back together, no matter how much you promise yourself to do that anyways.

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Plus some bad design choices (IMO) for NXG meant that less than 40% of the OpenG libraries were ever "successfully" ported.

[aeastet]

I can't say that I have a favorite. It seems lately that most of the versions past 2020 that are out are more unstable than I remember in the past. I have been doing this a long time so I will give some mile stones that I thought were big.

When we switched from version 5.0 to version 5.1 we finally had control Z. I could now go back in time to put something back that I accidentally erased.

In version 6.1 event structures were added. No more polling the buttons to see if they had changed. This also opened the door for many other things that we can do with event structures today.

[alexderjuengere]

I started with labview 8.6 32-bit student edition and therefore my first love is still labview professionel 2010 32-bit

I like Labview 2020 because it was the first version to fully supported 64 bit in terms of NI's vision toolkits, drivers etc.

Actually, I like the newer labview 2020+ versions  and I also appreciate the package installer tool, which is there since 2022(?) and I consider it to be an upgrade in comparison to making an offline-installer via the application builder, which needed a dummy-labview-project.

[crossrulz]

The version I probably used the longest would be 8.6.1, which had a lot of good features and worked well.

I used to upgrade my main LabVIEW version to maintain latest driver compatibility, which turned into upgrade every 3 years. So I was working with 2016, then jumped to 2019. I recently did the jump to 2024Q3 64-bit. I initially had some issues, but they seem to have been fixed with patches.

I would like to mess around with 2025, but NI License Manager 2025Q1 upgraded a library which makes it incompatible with corporate's license server version of FlexNET (https://www.ni.com/en/support/documentation/compatibility/24/ni-license-manager-and-volume-license-m...).