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Oh, good tip, Ton. I hadn't thought about using the afterprobe with breakpoints. That does make it quite a bit more useful. Still say it'd be better if it automatically tabulated iterations, tho

I wouldn't think so either. That kinda sucks -- I was hoping to start a sideline biz writing Treo apps in LabVIEW, if I could get some licensing stuff worked out with NI.

I see that now that there's an 8.2 release of the PDA toolkit, it's only available for the Windows mobile platforms. Did NI just decide to completely stop supporting Palm OS, and if so, can you use the LV8 PDA toolkit with LV 8.2?

Actually, I had forgotten about that. That is a very useful feature, although I really don't think it's on par with the addition of synchronization VIs or events. That is something that's fairly useful (and which I really haven't utilized that much, honestly). I don't really care about inline rendering of web pages. I really want rich text formatting, any implementation will do. HTML is just a convenient (although admittedly not quite optimized) standard. Very true. I apologize if my post was misread as saying "These are not good improvements." For the most part, the changes in 8 are good. I just don't find them useful. The last couple of versions of LabVIEW have certainly made it easier for beginner programmers to use the language. I just don't feel like the changes from 7->8 really expanded the power of LabVIEW. Now, 8.20 might -- the jury is still out on that for me. I've tried to do that with custom probes and usually end up crashing LabVIEW. I'm honestly not sure what I'm doing wrong -- I just right click on a string wire (for instance), select custom probes --> New, select Create a New Probe, put in the probe name, and BOOM, there goes LV. At any rate, I was specifically referring to the afterprobe functionality. In its current implementation, I find it essentially useless. If it also maintained prior iterations of each wire's value (perhaps up to a limit set in the LV options), then it would be a lot more worthwhile for me. Note: After repeated tries, I did manage to get the custom probe implementation to work. Not sure why it was crashing every time, but once I was able to create one, I've been able to create several with no problems. Not sure what that was all about. I still would like to see that as default behavior for the afterprobe option.

:beer: Can't use OpenG at my current work site, so I hadn't even looked into it. If I can download that separately, I'm all over it and thank you :beer: I'm still torn about the utility of the project explorer, really. Better SCC integration is great, and I do appreciate that. The other things are interesting refinements, and useful in specific instances, but I still don't see that they don't open up new avenues of programming like the 4->5, 5->6, or 6->7 upgrades did. The OO integration might (although from the demo I saw yesterday, I am a little skeptical -- it doesn't look like it really offers that much that I wasn't doing before, just a different interface for doing so). Personally, if NI really wanted to make some changes that would make me stand up and say "Time to upgrade", I'd have to go with a real implementation of scripting; a HTML-parsing string indicator (or some other decent text-formatted implementation); better VI monitoring/profiling tools; or in place of the afterprobe, a probe mode that tabulates values across the run of the VI -- that would be worth the performance hit for me. Oh yeah, I forgot. I do REALLY appreciate the improvements to DLL functionality in LV 8.20, though. Big time kudos to the dev team for that.

I think the reason that a bunch of changes don't get talked about is that the upgrade from 7.1 to 8 includes some cool changes, but very few really useful ones. XControls are very cool, but are useful for a slim minority of users (I really WANT to use them, and I haven't come up with an instance yet where they really made sense). The scrollbar for arrays is cool, but as previously stated, there was a workaround. I also agree that it's not an optimal UI element. However, this is probably tied for 2nd as the most utilitarian change in 8 (#1 might be the graph palette changes). Haven't yet seen the utility in afterprobes yet. I might just be running slow, however. It seems to me that unless you customarily keep that option on (which, as you said, slows execution significantly), it isn't very useful. By the time I know I need probes, I probably know where I want them and might as well put the probes in and use them the old fashioned way. Again, fail to see how matrices are more useful than equivalent arrays. They look cool, and it's probably a little easier to work with. Maybe. But does it really offer any additional utility? And how do they compare in terms of performance? I think enough has been said about the changes to the File I/O stuff. Suffice it to say, I'm not a big fan of the new setup either. Variant performance gains are always good. I don't really see that as an addition to tout, however. Almost every iteration of the language has performance increases, I kind of take that for granted. On the down side, when I upgraded, I found it acutely painful to develop in 8 due to the random palette reorganization. I don't think I exaggerate when I say it probably cost me a couple of weeks of work time (i.e. for the first month, it took me twice as long to program things as it should), until I finally got irritated and manually re-wrote the entire palette set (which brings up an entirely new set of problems, since the editor seems to have gotten flakier and I still can't find the option to save multiple palettes on the same machine). As much as I like new features, I resisted upgrading to LV8 for a good long while because it didn't offer anything I needed. Once I did upgrade, my hesitance was shown to be warranted, as the new 'features' tended to slow me down more than making things more efficient. When I upgrade, I expect that development will get faster, not slower, and that the new features will fill needs that I have (i.e. multithreading, undo, synchronization VIs in LV5; waveforms, control refs, variants, polymorphics in 6; events in 7). I cannot say that going from 7.1 to 8 satisfied that expectation.

Can't believe they didn't add that property till LV8. I could write somethin, but i'm really short on time. Anyone got a predone solution they can share?