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Did you just read my mind? Perhaps I was reading yours <Old man (well, middle aged) yelling at the sky> We have been waiting for major upgrades of LabVIEW for years, and after so many years without much progress it turns out NI has really just abandoned the ship to build a different one, not sail-worthy until 2020. Where does that leave LabVIEW TG (This Generation) but dead in the water? The road map does not exactly encourage us to base our business on it. We either spend time and money on staying updated on the next generation stuff for many years until it actually can replace this generation, or move away from NI. Frankly I would have preferred it if they kept us in the dark, working on NextGen for another 4 years until it had reached "parity", and only *then* told the world about it. </Old man yelling at the sky>

A little while ago I posted some code on how to create boolean controls with images that scale well because the images are vector based and can scale up or down better than a static image like a PNG. After making that I made a utility that allows for selecting an image, and a control template and it creates the control. I showed this off to Danielle Hamburger and she encouraged me to clean it up and post it to the community. I'm still putting this in the In Development section just because there are several external tools needed that working around would be ideal if this were to be finished but for now it works and I use it often. So it works like you'd think. There is a library of vector images you select from, pick the one you want, then pick the Control Type (which is a folder of CTLs), then click create and it creates the control setting the decal button, VI description (adding License text if needed) and sets the icon editor icon. Dependencies If you just run the Vector Boolean Control Creator you'll need OpenG Time, OpenG File, and the JKI State Machine toolkit installed in LabVIEW 2015 or newer. The included libraries will work without anything else as long as you are in Windows (more on that later). If you want to include your own controls there are a few more steps and I left a text file explaining that in the Template Controls folder, but I included several already. If you want to add your own images I also left instructions in the Libraries folder. I wrote a VI that can convert from SVGs to the needed PNG and EMF files as long as you download inkscape (again instruction text files included). But inkscape is only a dependency if you want to use that utility to add your own libraries which are in SVG. Demo For good measure I made a Jing video showing how it works. Windows Only... So the Windows only part is an interesting one. I started with my UI being just a single 2D picture control and as you type your search in the top, it would go and open each image that matched the result, shift them into rows and columns, detect the number of columns shown, then detect and show mouse selection, and all the other stuff that would be needed. To say the least it was slow. I tried several ways to improve it, but in the end it was slow and I couldn't come up with a solution I liked. I could have added a search button but I really like the live search of typing it in and seeing it update as you type just like the icon editor glyphs do. So for a first release I went with the cheap and hacky solution and that was to leverage some .Net to embed a Windows Explorer window into my front panel, which is just the search results of a folder on disk. This now means you see the PNG images on the front panel, but it will only use that to show the UI to you, but then use the vector based EMF file when creating the control. Doing the search was a bit weird too since I couldn't figure out how invoke a search with the Explorer .Net so instead I wrote to a temp location a saved search that is XML, which I tell the UI to navigate to which then shows the search results. Oh and there is some .Net GDI resize going on so the PNG image is used as icon editor icon for the control but dependency could likely be removed with some G work. Anyway hope people find this useful. Vector Boolean Creator.zip

This is a pretty famous problem within large projects, as with netscape, word, mozilla, etc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2139176 or https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ I'm not convinced that NI hasn't done the same to themselves by neglecting their existing customers in favor of...whoever ngx is supposed to benefit...but I don't think you can blame the language, especially one as large as c# (which includes the core language, the base libraries on top of it, and then the ui frameworks asp/wpf/winforms). I'm sure there are similar anecdotes of people who moved from c to c++ and it was 'too slow', or people who never got their product to market because they spent too much time trying to understand their c++ compiler errors. Fair enough -- one thing I wondered is why they havent gotten around to cross compilation now that the compiler is llvm. Clearly they know how to cross compile -- they do pharlap, linux-arm, linux x64, and VxWorks without too much of a problem...but no obvious cross-compile for desktops.

Assuming you're talking about the Data Type Parsing VIs in LabVIEW 2015 and later, you can read the documentation on them. Or you can watch my Hidden Gems presentation in which I describe some use cases for their predecessors, the VariantDataType VIs.