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This year I went to NI Connect (the new NI Week) for the first time in 7 years. I thought I would be the exception and see all those that have gone year after year. But it turns out that many of us this was our first year back, or some last year was their first year back since COVID. In general I think this is a good sign, that things are moving in the right direction. NI has some new leadership that has a LabVIEW focus, and at least at the moment appear to want to push adoption. Reversing the subscription only is a welcome change, but for many it hurt the inertia of business. Once a ship starts moving in the wrong direction it takes a while to come back. Or put another way, respect is lost in buckets and gained in drops. Plenty of businesses have likely moved away from LabVIEW and NI because of poor decisions, that in my opinion, were so NI would look more valuable for an Emerson sale. I'm in the Detroit area, and plan to retire doing LabVIEW. At the moment I think I can do that. Not long ago I didn't think that would be the case. We were just blindly paying the SSP each year. The subscription only model, made management here reevaluated things. We took a few years off. Then perpetual licenses came back again so we renewed. I think we will likely get a new perpetual license every 4 years or so. This will hurt NI since this means less users on the newest release finding issues. Building back trust will take time here, and this will likely play out in a similar way around the world for other companies.

I'll caveat this with this is only my opinion as a European. Market forces may be completely different to my perception in the US. When I first started, LabVIEW was basically a loss-leader to sell hardware. The sales people would give it away free (or heavily discounted) if you bought the hardware. It proliferated and people like myself learnt and expanded our capabilities. Over time it launched a small consultancy industry specialising in LabVIEW. There were a few major successes such as JKI and some partnerships along with single developer consultants. The test and measurement industry had few rivals to LabVIEW's capabilities. Fast forward to today and I think the emphasis is now firmly on large organisations with enormous hardware requirements-in particular governmental organisations. CERN is an obvious one in Europe (CERN being intergovernmental) but I believe there are many in the US. The Test and Measurement was, for the most part, lost to Python and although there are one or two consultants still operating in my neck of the woods, that part of the industry is basically gone here. So. In my view there is still an appreciable number of opportunities working for large companies' in the US and Europe but if you are looking to be a self employed contractor (in Europe) then you would be better off with something else.

I think there is a future and NI has significantly increased their activity and promotion for it (I guess one could be sarcastic and say that considering that NI's promotion of LabVIEW and active support of the community was pretty much zero just 3 years ago, anything more than zero is significant). It will however not reach the stage that Dr. T once optimistically proposed as "LabVIEW everywhere". But that is not necessary. LabVIEW has still some interesting features and advantages and there won't be any programming environment ever that suits everybody. The license change is welcome but not to significant, I think, as the new(old) perpetual license is basically quite beyond reasonable in my opinion. LabVIEW was expensive in the old days already but the new perpetual license cost is in my opinion simply to high (it's more than double of what it was before they tried to force feed the subscription). If I had to pay it myself, I would most likely stop with LabVIEW and simply use the Community Edition as a hobby. However, you should anyhow never build your future on just one leg. LabVIEW can be an interesting and even viable option, but with LabVIEW alone you never could and never will be able to earn a keeping. You need additional expertise. LabVIEW shines in combination with hardware control, so having a good understanding on electronics, electricity, communication protocols, interoperability with other systems is what makes you stand apart in a world of other programmers. The actual world doesn't run on blockchain, LLMs, marketing and stock exchange, even if that seems what a large amount of people believe, since it promises quick profits. But the hype of today is the old story of tomorrow, since there is already another hype to chase then. Almost all the AI hypers on social media today, were trying to peddle their cr*pto hype a few years ago, and will all quickly move to the next hype once AI has been falling down from the hype (which it actually has done already more than once in the past, but most people seem to have a short memory or simply haven't been around long enough to remember). Of course, I have about 10 more years I need to look forward too, so for me it is quite easy. There is enough of LabVIEW around to keep me full time busy with that until then, (but I like to also do some hardware and luckily can do that too). For someone younger, you definitely need to have some options open.

Technically it is a resource collector, but not exactly in the same way typical garbage collectors work. Normal garbage collectors work in a way where the runtime system somehow tracks variables usage at runtime by monitoring when they get out of runtime scope and then attempts to deallocate any variable that is not a value type in terms of the stack space or scope space it consumes. The LabVIEW resource collector works in a slightly different way in that whenever a refnum gets created, it is registered together with the current top level VI in the call chain and a destroy callback with a refnum resource manager. When a top level VI stops executing, both by being aborted or simply executing its last diagram element, it informs the refnum resource manager that it goes idle, and that will then make the refnum resource manager scan its registered refnums to see if any is associated with that top level VI and if so, call its destroy callback. So while it is technically not a garbage collector in the exact same way as what Java or .Net does, it still is for most practical purposes a garbage collector. The difference is, that a refnum can be passed to other execution hierarchies through globals and similar and as such might still be used elsewhere, so technically isn't really garbage yet. There are three main solutions for this: 1) Don't create the refnum in an unrelated VI hierarchy to be passed to another hierarchy for use 2) If you do create it in one VI hierarchy for use in another, keep the initial hierarchy non-idle (running) until you do not need that refnum anymore anywhere. 3) If the refnum is a resource that can be named (eg. Queues, Notifiers) obtain a seperate refnum to the named resource in each hierarchy. The underlying object will stay alive for as long as at least one refnum is still valid. Each obtained refnum is an independent reference to the object and destroying one (implicit or explicit) won't destroy any of the other refnums.

In a previous life, I used to teach a CLD level class using this book, and enjoyed it a lot -- Some of it is certainly outdated at this point, but I think it still has a lot of solid info / strategies in it. I've attached the files as a .zip file to this post. Good luck! Effective LabVIEW Programming Files.zip

Well, yes and no and yes and maybe. It all depends on what you're trying to measure and what the system requirements are. And, of course, just because it's cheaper up front doesn't mean it's cheaper overall. If it costs $200 less but takes me 50 hours longer to implement then it costs more.

Another VI I thought someone reading this forum thread might find helpful. This one calls the one I posted previously as a subVI. "Make Control Glow.vi" draws a fading rectangle behind the specified control. Save it and its subVI ("Offset Glow Rect.vi") to the same subdirectory. For example, here's a glow on a system OK button. Color and border thickness are parameterized. Saved in LV2020. Make Control Glow.vi Offset Glow Rect.vi

This seems to work... CRC16-CCITT-FALSE.vi

Thanks Mads.

You *can* use DETT on built applications, just enable VI server access and debugging in the build. Here is a description of it: http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/A50A8BBFD737679186257D7700688757