LabWindows/CVI Idea Exchange

Following the discussion with Luis here I want to suggest

1. a possibility to confine the variable view
2. allowing to move confined windows within the IDE, i.e. position the source code browser to the left (or right) of the code window, similar to the workspace window.

Wolfgang

My 2000 dollar worth, run of the mill desktop PC has 4 teraflop of brute computation power hiding in 4 GPUs. None of which is accessible for my programs I develop in Labwindows.

Shame!

With the release of the new OpenCL it is possible to generate a "platform independent" GPU computing library. That would place Labwindows on the same or better footing than Labview that already has some GPU computing support.

The advantages are obvious: huge gain in data processing speed, real-time application with streaming data,  pattern-recognition (video) applications, image processing, data-parallel tasks in (technical) modeling arena.

I am playing with some optimization algorithms (genetic algorithms, evolutionary algorithms) that benefit and show amazing gains since they are ideal for data-parallel applications! Currently working on the specs for a new type of controller that would optimize several parameters to figure out the state of the tissue culture (expanding, producing, overgrowing, etc.) to maximize productivity and to calculate the optimal settings using evolutionary algorithms... Any complex process control could take advantage of this kind of applications -currently not available- because of computational limitations. Had a previous optimization task that would have taken 150,000 years to complete using a brute force algorithm on a "monofilament" CPU-based application. Converted it to a genetic algorithm and it gives me a good enough solution in 3-4 days on the same standard PC. Now, with GPU, that problem could be solved in fifteen minutes while expanding the evolutionary depth and finding better solutions using even more complex fitness functions.

Ask yourself what do you want: tinkering with the conveniences of the IDE that already does the job well enough; or open the door to new landscapes that could be conquered by using the simple elegance and effectiveness of LabWindows and the power of GPUs?

It has been discussed a few times in this forum, but so far it is impossible to 'know' when the mouse cursor is above a certain menu item. This information might be used for example to display some context help.

Hence I would suggest that using the menu callback of the respective menu item it should be possible to be notified about the mouse cursor position once it is over the area of the respective menu entry, e.g. by providing a MOUSE_OVER_MENU_ITEM event.

Currently, it is only possible to load XML for parsing from an xml file.  In order to load xml data from a string, it is necessary to either write to a temporary file, or use the MSXML library directly.  It would be fairly simple to modify the CVIXMLLoadDocument() Function (or create a new function) which uses the MSXML IXMLDOMDocumentloadXML() function, which allows loading XML directly from a string. 

Adding this code to the current function after the IXMLDOMDocumentload() function would improve the CVIXMLLoadDocument() function so that it tries opening the input string as direct XML if it is not a path (Replaces line 167):

__caErrChk(MSXML_IXMLDOMDocumentload(xmlHdl, NULL, variantPath, &success));
	 
	if(!success) //if loading as a path fails, try reading as direct XML code
    {
        __caErrChk(MSXML_IXMLDOMDocumentloadXML(xmlHdl, NULL, fullPath, &success));    
    }