desidude

Unfortunately many of us (with no relation to NI) take opinion of NI employees (especially those related to R&D) seriously, to me there is no difference between your unofficial or your official NI position, the assumption is that your personal opinion is based on your vast experience in actually dealing with these technical designs and issues, where as the official NI position on the same issue is whatever best suits NI business. Hence I (and I'm sure most others) rather take your personal opinion seriously even if it doesn't match the official NI position. Having said that, five years ago or so a bunch of NI R&D engineers came to our booth at NIweek and adamantly/forcefully convinced us that Xcontrols were going away because they won't be in NXG. And since regular LabVIEW was going to get phased out, we better not use them in our design! Using Xcontrols was the core requirement of our toolkit, so my company decided to not waste more time in finishing or launching our toolkit. Now, five years later, I don't know how many even bother using NXG, but Xcontrols are definitely still being used and still "officially" supported by NI for the foreseeable future. Essentially despite creating a technology, we lost opportunity because we valued personal opinion/position of NI R&D engineers back then, so we lose if we value personal opinions of NI employees (if it doesn't match official NI position), we lose even if we don't value them (for example, due to inferior design)!

I started using LabVIEW on a Mac SE in 1988 while in college and I have regularly used it ever since. I have also developed a couple of unique technologies for LabVIEW platform that use LVOOP, Xcontrols, and VI scripting, among other techs which aren't normally used by most LabVIEW users (my inventions were the reason why my company was a part of the elite LabVIEW roadmap group.) I was once a CLD, and then a CLA, and now since I failed CLA-R I'd have to start from scratch again - all because I got tricked by twisted questions. It is irrelevant that I can easily answer straight-forward questions relevant to LabVIEW Architect skills. This is why many are finding the regular 4-hours CLA exam more relevant than this CLA-R brouhaha. It's really a crap-shoot, I had read this thread earlier so I was preparing for almost 3 days nonstop, specifically going over the Advanced Architecture online training and software engineering manual/etc. Yet the way they worded most questions in actual exam is what caused almost all of my failed answers, not a lack of knowledge (I was allowed 15 mins of review after the test.) It didn't help that I was sitting in a closed small room right next to a woman who had overloaded herself with perfume, oh the headache! Hints for others: 1) Notice excessive usage of "NOT" in so many sample exam questions, its simply to throw you off, absolutely no other reason and nothing to do with your LabVIEW Architect knowledge. Actual exam is no different, this is where most are getting thrown off. Furthermore, I failed EVERY question on API, know why? Because of subtle twists they threw into the questions which I didn't catch while quickly going through them in a limited time, not because I can't develop well structured LabVIEW APIs (which I have successfully done for several decades!) 2) Pray to your gods for luck; your knowledge is irrelevant if you do not understand the questions correctly in the short amount of available time. You may know the material but read questions multiple times and FAST while paying attention to my hint#1 above, otherwise you're guaranteed to fail. (See what I mean by nothing to do with your LabVIEW Architect skills?) 3) Try not to flag too many questions for a later review because you'll waste precious time re-reading them again later and not able to finish. Only flag questions for a later review where you are over 90% confused. 🙂 Otherwise pick your best answer quickly and move forward. (Out of 12 questions I had flagged for a later review, I only failed 2 despite not able to finish review of over 7 of them due to time.) 4) Recertification by points: This is a no-brainer with a catch. I used to be involved in the community but I realized too late that for certify-by-points you also have to send emails to certification at ni dot com so that they record every event (quite ridiculous, because all events were at NI locations and sponsored by NI, including user-group meetings where they make you put your name and sign.) I had done LabVIEW presentations at local user-groups to advanced as well as new-to-labview groups, NIweek, and local colleges/universities as a part of industry involvement in their curriculum. I realized too late that ALL of this was essentially wasted because even though I certainly had more participation points than needed, I just didn't keep a track of them and sent to NI to record! *Poof* its all gone. If being CLA is important to you, good luck with recertification. For me, its not worth another days of efforts (I have actual work to do) because in the past 10 years no one in my company or our clients have asked me if I were LabVIEW certified, let alone if I were a CLA. In fact it is doubtful if any of them know what CLA is or care. Only NI system integrators seem to care about CLA due to marketing.