Roy F

We've posted a Knowledge Base (KB) article on this subject; Security of LabVIEW VI Password Protection vs. Removing VI Block Diagrams, which explains, in some detail, why the VI password protection feature is implemented as it is and the alternative available when stronger protection is required. We also plan to add a link to this KB in our product and/or help documentation, where appropriate, as part of our next major release. Our aim is to do our best to help users be aware of the issue and understand their options. I will monitor this thread for a bit and respond to questions or concerns as needed. Sincerely, Roy Faltesek Senior Group Manager LabVIEW R&D National Instruments

Daklu, I do not know you, but I know some of those who are singing your praises, so I am suitably impressed with your abilities. I hope all works out well in the end, and am optimistic that it will, but I wanted to compliment you on your positive and helpful attitude in the face of this adversity. Your reaction to a bad situation was to start a discussion that is very helpful to others who will take the CLA and, I hope, also to us at National Instruments. I work with Customer Education periodically regarding certification and have faith that they will review your case and respond appropriately. Perhaps the result was appropriate, perhaps it was appropriate but we should add some additional guidance or requirements to the exam instructions, or perhaps some changes need to be implemented regarding grading. I do not know what will happen or what changes might come of this, but I am optimistic and very appreciative of your time and effort here. Congratulations on having such a fine reputation amongst your peers; that reflects many many successes in various respects (communication, attitude, technical) over a long period of time - very impressive. Roy Faltesek Senior Group Manager LabVIEW R&D

The support engineers are trained to report all bugs to R&D via a mechanism we call CAR (Corrective Action Request). You getting the CAR number is not required for this to happen (but it does give you a warm fuzzy). Typically, a support engineer works with a user on a problem, becomes convinced a bug exists, helps the user develop a workaround, completes the call, THEN files the CAR. So, typically, an AE will not have a CAR number until after he is done with the support call. Support engineers know that we need these bug reports filed to make things better. They get credit for filing these, so calling in a problem on a bug in the product or submitting it via the NI.com forums actually helps the support engineer get credits (a good news/bad news story ). Roy LabVIEW R&D

Jimi, It is not our policy to refuse to investigate problems in large projects. There has obviously been a misunderstanding. We need to be able to reproduce problems in order to fix them. Anything we can get from a user that helps us do that is valuable. Reducing a problem down to the smallest number of components is obviously very beneficial, but as you stated, not always possible. If you are willing to send us everything we need to duplicate a problem, we will not only accept it and investigate, we had better be appreciative of your willingness to help us. So, I apologize if you have encountered some support situations which were not handled as well as they should have been. If you will supply the SR numbers where we refused to accept your offer to send us code that reproduces a problem, I will follow-up on our side, both to get your problem satisfactorily investigated and perhaps counsel a young support engineer. As for the NDA, it's not something we want to do regularly, and we obviously want to push a harder to get the problem recreated in something that would not require NDA, but we will if needed. If you have encountered a problem which we can not make progress on without your code, and you feel the problem is important enough for both of our companies to have NDAs processed, then we should pursue one. We want R&D buy in before doing this. My recommendation would be to ask the AE for an escalation to a Product Support Engineer (you're within R&D at that point) with the idea being that you will need an NDA before you can send us your code. If you get pushback (e.g. disagreement on the severity of the problem), go to your DSM for help on escalating the problem. I certainly appreciate all of the time you have spent helping us to find and fix our problems. Roy Faltesek Senior Group Manager LabVIEW R&D