ShaunR

Hmmm. In 2009 and 2010 it was max 8 per exec, per priority irrespective of the number of cores. Max 200+1 in total. I've just looked in 2011 (I rarely use it) and indeed you seem to be right; you can set 20. However, it can be set to 20 on both my Quad core (8) and my dual core (4) so I think they just bumped up the limit rather than made it scalable in accordance with number of cores.

The maximum is 8 per execution system, per priority. You can get your twenty by spreading them over 3 execution systems (for normal priority)

+1 for JSON.(strings) Strict typing is for wimps.

Some pragmatic info here. This is a bit outdated but still a good base reference.

Nope. Why do you need a cache for prefs? (let the OS do that) Kind of defeats the object.

No. I use a database (SQLite) nowadays for preferences.

You can still use a Get method. Just you have to make it a singleton (which is the default for a VI, but you have to program it for classes-e.g use a DVR).

Wiring through error clusters (if they exist) is recommended since if someone wires them up it will clear any errors on the wire from previous operations which is unexpected bahaviour.

Thats because I cut and pasted your seed, method so it's not surprising (i.e you were trying to fit 1,0000,0000 x 1,000,0000 chars in memory) There's no pleasing some people

A bit of lateral thinking?

I'd forgotten about that. You can even give it a script filename with all your commands and upload entire directories with the GLOB command.

You will need the LabVIEW Internet Toolkit if you are going to do it from LabVIEW. e.g.

Can't wait to see the screenshots. Congrats.

Well. For me anything that doesn't use 3rd party products is preferred But generally when we are talking about this sort of thing we are also talking about convergence on a solution for the final optimisation step. As was indicated with the "Fast Trim"; using LabVIEW parallelism will always converge faster since the worst case is a solution is in the middle (if split over 2 for loops) rather than at the end. This however comes with the caveat for this case in how do you tell one loop that the other has found it without introducing complexity that mitigates the benefit. I haven't tried your example (I don't have the JKI toolkit) but in theory enabling parallelism of the for loop should also yield benefits although I have yet to see a real world scenario where it actually does.

Well. Ignoring x-platform considerations and that fact that Active X is built on windows 3.1 technology (A.K.A legacy). It's very easy to write Active X components very poorly and since you don't have the source. you can't do anything about the memory/reference leaks, GPFs and hangs that abound with Active X controls, They always look like a very easy solution, but I forget the number of times they have turned out to be anything other than a pain in the arse, sometimes risking the project. Additionally. If an active X control does go down, it invariably causes strange behavior all around the OS meaning that you end up on lots of wild goose chases trying to figure out whats wrong. IMHO you are far better off not considering them to begin with and you will still have a full head of hair well into your 70s. They have bitten so hard in the past, that teams that I manage now are banned from using Active X and if a supplier only has an active X driver to interface to their equipment, they are disregarded regardless of the quality/performance of the hardware.

Well. Probably 2010 because 2011 was supposed to be a "stability and performance" update (which when compared to 2009.....wasn't ) rather than a "look at all these cool features" update. (I'm not holding my breath for 2012 either )

Active X is a (legacy) Microsoft windows only technology. You will not be asked to do anything that is 3rd party dependent (i.e Active X .NET, windows API) although that does not prohibit using those technologies to achieve the requirements. The purpose of the examinations is to ascertain your LabVIEW skills, not your knowledge of the platform. CSV only means "Comma Delimited Values" and as JGCode pointed out, it is only linked to Excel because of windows associations (it is not a proprietary formatted "Excel" file that can only be opened with a Microsoft product). In fact. I highly recommend you stay well clear of active X not only in the exam, but also in your professional role.

I'm always afraid that if they did introduce something awesome enough to make me upgrade from LV2009; they would stick it in a toolkit

I always get the terminology round the wrong way (has to do with a boolean array in LabVIEW having the LSb on the left). Thanks for pointing it out. So. What I said before, but swap the terms.

You state that only the most significant bytes are used. This is a little unusual since an encoder is usually a counter. It is more likely that the number is little endian wheras LabVIEW numbers are big endian (i.e. you may have to reverse the bits to get 0-2^n).

Get.vi

I prefer to think of it as sponsored art and really no different from commissioning a statue.

Someone got out of the wrong side of bed this morning

Trent 1000 Jet Engine

Yeah. If you are behind a natted router it will fail (as it cannot do a reverse DNS lookup to verify the server). But you've figured it out.