How to migrate away from Labwindows/CVI?

[SteveD123]

I have enjoyed using NI's products for over 15 years. Their direct sales model meant that their area sales engineer would come to my site to discuss my application and recommend suitable solutions. The vertical integration model (hardware, drivers & application development software) meant that the engineer could raise issues with the design teams and programmers concerned. If there was a fault or incompatibility issue with NI products there was a real chance of getting it fixed.

Lately, NI has withdrawn from the direct sales route, and this has caused issues, see here:

https://forums.ni.com/t5/BreakPoint/Can-t-call-NI-to-get-help-selecting-hardware/m-p/4163272  

As my preferred application development environment is Labwindows/CVI, the situation is even worse:

1. No meaningful upgrades for at least 4 years.
2. Not possible to create panels that follow the modern Windows look.
3. The last time a suggestion on the Idea Exchange was set to "Under Consideration" was 2017.
4. NI engineers no longer seem to respond to posts. There are no longer replys by Wendy L or anyone of their technical capability.

I have to conclude that Labwindows/CVI is basically abandoned by NI. Even if it was open-sourced, I do not think that there is a large enough community remaining to undertake the task of upgrading to C11, the minimum to get current (judging from the activity on this board, and the fact that there are about 5 individuals that are really active).

So what is the best path to migrate away from Labwindows/CVI? Assuming the use of many of NI's toolkits & libraries, but especially VISA, SQL and the User Interface library.

[rolfk]

Well I can't really help you with a good advice how to migrate from LabWindows/CVI away.

There are a number of issues you mention, some more grave than others.

- NI-VISA: this is an open API that you can call from any programming environment. There are bindings for many programming languages already, creating a new binding is a bit of work but not rocket science at all if you know the according language well. If you move to a different C(++) programming environment there should be zero porting effort for this unless you used the LabWindows/CVI libraries for serial port communication.

- SQL library: that is a bit of a problem. The LabWindows/CVI Database Toolkit has a quite versatile and clean interface, not necessarily supporting every advanced SQL feature, but it's good enough for most of the tasks. It's also closed source (at least was when I was still working with LabWindows CVI) so not easy to port to another environment. It wouldn't be impossible to write a library that supports a similar API, but quite a bit of work.

- UI library: This is the most complicated thing. There is zero change to try to get a similar versatile and broad implementation that would be also compatible with the LabWindows CVI library. The only way to migrate is to completely rewrite your UI with whatever libraries your intended target environment supports.

Some of the Toolkit libraries in LabWindows CVI are or were at least in source code, so those could be ported to another environment although you would also have to check licensing issues as they are NI copyrighted.

And while I work mostly in LabVIEW these days (and Visual Studio/GCC for low level stuff), I can't really recommend to move to LabVIEW. Aside from being a very different programming paradigm that most text programmers never really get friendly with 😀, there is also the issue that support for LabVIEW has equally diminished in the last few years. It's by far not as bad as for LabWindows/CVI, and I have some good hopes that it will survive long enough in some way or the other until my retirement, but it is noticeable enough that I can't really recommend it for someone to start with from scratch now.

Whatever you finally will end up to choose, don't expect the same amount of direct support that you were used to in the past for LabWindows/CVI. NI was a notable exception in terms of product support for many years, but they have caught up with the rest, unfortunately.

[TerryMoss]

If you think CVI windows are out of date, try working with a guy who uses stuff from the 80s.

They seem to have moved their support model to helping people with maintenance contracts only.

I don't get much help on the Forum from them, but if you have a service contract, they are pretty good.

I guess the Forum is for us....