JeffP

Hi everyone,

Apologies for the slow response - this thread kicked off a number of internal discussions within NI and I was waiting for some of those discussions to shake out before setting up these engagements.

First of all - I have set up a calendly link for scheduling time slots for 1x1 discussions. This is my first time trying calendly, so I have set up 30 minute time slots for three days later this week. Let me know if you have any suggestions or tweaks to make this more effective. Thank you in advance to those of you willing to take the time to talk to me, I appreciate it! In the link I specified two different types of discussions, please specify which kind of discussion you would like to have and I will send you a Microsoft Teams link. The first type is a user interview where we discuss how you use LabVIEW today. This is not focused on NXG, it is a way for me to better understand your workflows and pain points that you encounter today. This helps me better inform design decisions we make in NXG. The second type is a feedback discussion focused on NXG - this is more open format where I will do my best to answer your questions and discuss any feedback you have on NXG.

Second - I want to address some of the points in this thread about prior engagements with NI. For the last few years we have been very focused on closing the functionality gaps between LabVIEW and LabVIEW NXG - this means we have not done as much iteration on usability and existing functionality as we would have liked. Big gaps like dynamically loading a VI, sub panels, and hardware support were prioritized higher. As we are getting closer and the gaps are getting smaller, we are re-evaluating some of these longstanding complaints and looking to address them. For example Neil mentioned he had a lengthy discussion a few years ago and didn't see any product changes as a result. I discussed this with the product owner that conducted that discussion, and it (along with several other user interviews that expressed similar concerns) led to several significant design changes - including a major redesign of how we handle tearing tabs out of the editor. In that specific case the redesign represented a significant development effort and was deemed lower priority than closing some of the gaps we mentioned earlier, but as we get through some of those higher priority items I would expect us to look at it again. There were several other areas of feedback which did lead to product changes - such as more color on diagram constants and changes to how the palettes work. We know we need to do better at closing the loop so you can see the impact that these discussions have, and we are working on finding the right venue for having those discussions with the broadest possible audience.

 Regarding dr powells question about areas which I consider significant improvemented in NXG - there are a few which immediately come to mind

1. The workflow of detecting hardware and getting a first measurement has been significantly improved. We have heard consistent feedback from new users that the getting started experience in LabVIEW is difficult - so called 'blank VI syndrome'. We tried a few different ways of addressing this in LabVIEW, but in NXG automatic detection of hardware is improved and reflected directly in the project and measurement panels let users configure their measurement and basic signal processing before being translated to G code. That is not a workflow that impacts many of the more advanced users on this forum, but it makes LabVIEW more approachable to new users which is important to grow the user base. 

2. In my opinion the changes we have made to the project are a huge improvement. Requiring a project, using the project and components to manage the dependencies between files, and mirroring the project file structure on disk (which I realize not everyone is in favor of) has eliminated cross linking. Personally I find it speeds up my development for the editor to be picking the disk location of the files I am creating - especially when I am working with classes and creating a lot of files.

3. Components in general are a big improvement over the options in LabVIEW. They simplify dependency management and encourage modular code architecture. They solve many of the limitations of PPLs. Each component translates to an exe or gll when built, which simplifies build specifications. We have also enforced a strict rule of editor run behavior being the same as built application behavior, which should improve difficult to track down bugs where it works fine in the editor but breaks in a built application.

4. Moving to an xml file format will enable us to eventually have a significantly improved integration with git and other third party tools. We are not there today, but that is where we intend to get to.

5. This is less user-visible, but the underlying architecture of NXG is more flexible than LabVIEW and has been designed for extensions and plugins from the beginning. This is easiest with C#, but it means that community members who know C# are able to extend NXG in a myriad of ways that are not possible with LabVIEW.

As I said in my previous post - LabVIEW NXG is still a work in-progress. It is not ready for complex projects yet, but we are getting closer and moving quickly. Similar to what Stephen said - I believe the vector is good, and community engagement helps us refine our direction. 

Please grab a slot for a 1x1 discussion if you want to discuss this further or are willing to talk with me about your current workflows. 

Thanks!

So first I want to acknowledge some areas we could have done better. I have been involved in a number of discussions around what our migration strategy looks like, and the biggest gap we immediately identified is a lack of clear external messaging, so that is something we are looking to address. I have talked to all different kinds of users, and in a relatively short discussion we are able to align on whether or not NXG is ready for their use case. That is great, but you should be able to make that determination yourself by looking at public documentation, it should not require a call with me or a frustrating session of attempting to migrate an application. NI has tried to provide this in the past with the LabVIEW roadmap, but it doesn't have enough detail for you to make a high confidence decision. For example, it is not possible to differentiate between functionality that is not complete yet versus functionality which was intentionally omitted or intentionally changed.

We have also not done a very good job of explaining the background of specific decisions - which leads to some of the feedback in this thread where it seems like we have changed everything for no reason. Certainly I can point to some changes which were mistakes, and generally speaking we have the flexibility to undo those changes, but many of the bigger changes were intentional, designed, tested changes which we believe are an improvement. We intend to do a better job of publicly documenting those decisions.

It is hard to overstate the reorganization efforts that have happened within NI over the last couple of years. Last NIWeek Eric Starkloff talked about how we were organizing the company around business units instead of around products, and that has had broad reaching impact, but we were making major shifts in the way we built products in the last couple of years anyway. Like many of the large software companies we have been shifting to a user-centric development model where we actively try to bring the user into the development process instead of thinking we know what they need and developing in secret. A good example of this shift is the introduction of the product owner role in NI R&D, a role focused on ensuring we are delivering the right value to our users. Both the product owners and product planners have long histories of working with LabVIEW, so you should not feel like the decision makers working on LabVIEW NXG are completely detached from LabVIEW - in many cases the decision makers for the two products are the same. There have definitely been teething pains with this shift, but we are getting better at it. I saw several comments about feeling left out of the decision process, and there are certainly some valid concerns, but I would also point to the level of engagement over the last few years where the product owners and product planners have attended and solicited input at the CLA summits, GDevCon and NIWeek. We also have quite a few targeted user engagements when we are working on defining features and workflows. We can absolutely do more, and we plan to, but many significant product decisions have been made as a result of those engagements. Remember that there are a lot of LabVIEW users out there, and we can't talk to all of them. A light-hearted analogy would be to seeing the results of a national poll and saying - 'well nobody asked me!'

That being said, I do want to increase my engagement with this community, and there is clearly a lot of passion about making LabVIEW NXG the best it can be. I would love to set up some 1x1 interviews with those of you who are interested so I can better understand how you are using LabVIEW today. I will start a different thread about that.

Back to the main point - it is important to understand what LabVIEW NXG is today versus what it will become. LabVIEW NXG today is not ready for most of the applications of this community. You are some of the most advanced LabVIEW users around, and are collectively using nearly every feature in the product. As Stephen said early in this thread - NXG has many nice things, it just isn't ready for him (or most of you) yet. We are trying hard to get there and have made substantial progress, but there are still functionality gaps. We expect that you will continue to use LabVIEW for at least a few more years until NXG is more complete for your workflows. I saw a comment about not wanting to develop an application of thousands of files in NXG, and I agree that I don't consider NXG ready for that either. Similarly - converting a large project from LabVIEW to LabVIEW NXG is not something I would recommend yet either. The Conversion Utility and associated tooling is more effective for converting instrument drivers and libraries. To be honest I was surprised that no one in this thread pointed out that there is currently no way to probe classes, and no way to make custom probes.

Yes we are already at version 5.0 and we still haven't built a full replacement for LabVIEW. That is a reflection of the incredible array of features in LabVIEW and the diversity of users and user cases that this community contains. However version 1.0 was not intended as a full replacement for LabVIEW and neither is version 5.0. For a subset of our user base who are building less complex applications NXG is ready for them and they are using it. For example a lot of work went into the workflow of helping a simple user take and process their first measurement, and we are building out from that foundation. When I talked about our reorganization and change in philosophy - that also translates into how we prioritize features and workflows. We are not just racing to recreate every last piece of LabVIEW in LabVIEW NXG. We are trying to understand the problems you were using those features to solve so we can determine if that same solution is the best choice for NXG.

I plan on also addressing some of the specific points of feedback in this thread, but this post turned out much longer than I had intended! Hopefully that provides a bit of framing around the current state of LabVIEW NXG.

Thanks,

Jeff

First of all, hi everyone and thank you all for the feedback. I really do appreciate it, and I want you to know that I generally read these threads even if I don't always participate. Stephen also periodically sends threads to me and the other relevant product owners.

I am the product owner responsible for G language in LabVIEW NXG. There are other product owners responsible for other aspects of LabVIEW NXG and the related technologies. Our role in LabVIEW R&D is to advocate for the user within the development team. We am ultimately responsible for making sure the functionality we add to the product is valuable to our users.

That being said - I don't want to oversell my role. As the product owner (which we have started calling productization lead because I don't actually own the product) I don't set the priority of which functionality we invest in first - that is decided by our planning organization, but I work closely with them and have a lot of input into that process. It is the responsibility of planning to identify high level workflows and investment areas, and it is the shared responsibility of the product owner and development team to design and build solutions that satisfy those requirements. 

There is a lot of good feedback here, much of which I was already aware of, and much of which predates my role existing. I want to take the time to properly address the different points in this thread - so expect some follow up posts from me next week, but first I just wanted to introduce myself. 

Jeff Peacock

Hi LogMAN,

I looked into this more and found a case where the patch did not fix the issue. I have tested with your specific case against our new fix, and I believe it should now be fixed. If you take the attached VI and replace the file at LabVIEW 2013vi.libAppBuilderEngineAB_Engine_Update_Source_from_Linker.vi with it, you should be able to build.

Please let me know if that doesn't work.

Thanks

AB_Engine_Update_Source_from_Linker.vi

Have they posted dvd ISOs yet?

(Platform ISOs, not driver ISOs.)

If you search ni.com/downloads and narrow by 2013 and NI Developer Suite you should be able to see the downloads for the three Platform DVD if you have SSP on the account you are searching with.

The search URL I used is here - http://search.ni.com/nisearch/app/main/p/bot/no/ap/tech/lang/en/pg/1/sn/n1:2013,n8:142,ssnav:pdl/

Hopefully that works for you!

- credit to Altenbach for the quick search path