Is there a new version of Labwindows 2023 planned?

[paul.knight@zeroavia.com]

Good news.  Hopefully it will pan out.

[MarcelK]

My colleagues went to the NI Days Germany and were pretty much told the same thing. Apparently there will be at least one more major release.

[MarcelK]

By the way, 2020f3 and 2020f4 seem identical. The only obvious difference is a version bump of the "ni certificates" package.

[rolfk]

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@MarcelK wrote:

By the way, 2020f3 and 2020f4 seem identical. The only obvious difference is a version bump of the "ni certificates" package.

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The download size at least seems different:

f3: 1.64GB

f4: 1.52GB

Seems unlikely that a version bump of the NI certificates makes such a big difference in size 😁

[MarcelK]

f3 came with f2 f1 f0 packages as well, f4 got rid of them.

[carlox]

f4 is the same as f3, simply repackaged.
If I try to install over my f3 current setup, installer terminates with "nothing to do" (or something similar).

Honestly, I can understand - at most - that a company would prefer to follow one path rather than another, leaving thousands of users stranded, but this release of fake patches seems like a real joke to me.

[rolfk]

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@carlox wrote:

f4 is the same as f3, simply repackaged.
If I try to install over my f3 current setup, installer terminates with "nothing to do" (or something similar).

Honestly, I can understand - at most - that a company would prefer to follow one path rather than another, leaving thousands of users stranded, but this release of fake patches seems like a real joke to me.

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It might be more than just a fake patch. There is a reasonable possibility that the quick and dirty installation of f1, f2 and f3 patches in subsequent order caused some problems on certain systems, so that someone did go through the problem of making a proper combined patch rather than applying a series of patches on top of each other.

[carlox]

Unlikely, but possible. Especially if you're an incurable optimist. 🤣

[rolfk]

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@carlox wrote:

Unlikely, but possible. Especially if you're an incurable optimist. 🤣

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Well I'm just as fascinated by conspiracy theories as everybody else. 😁

But considering what effort goes into creating and releasing a new patch, I would be extremely surprised if someone went to that trouble just to make it look like there is more activity on this front. Until recently, NI was pretty much determined to let LabWindows/CVI die off, they just didn't dare to say so, probably because of that ominous, unnamed account!

[Slateman]

We've been led a merry dance by NI who just want people to keep buying/subscribing to a product with little support, if there are going to be new versions of Labwindows/CVI then they should have announced it officially.

In the meantime they are haemorrhaging users who have either already migrated to another product or are actively looking for a replacement which makes the economic feasability for NI/Emerson of a new labwindows/cvi version even less likely.

I personally have heard enough information from other sources to make me believe there will be no major future labwindows/cvi releases.

My main usage case of labwindows/cvi is creating headless DLLs that work with TestStand (Teststand pulls in the parameters automatically due to the 'special' CVI linker which makes development a lot easier). No other linker/linker settings have that capability...so without labwindows/cvi the main QOL reason for purchasing new TestStand licenses disappears in a puff of smoke

I've already built a new toolchain using an open source IDE, coupled with gdb & clang 21 (rather than clang 3.3 that labwindows uses) which is ideal for our use case and our developers don't need to use/learn a new programming language and migration of code from previous projects takes minutes.