Darren

Ah, there's the piece I was missing. Thanks for those details. I have filed CAR 711518 on this issue. I agree that it is a significant usability concern that it is so easy to wire to that null reference terminal, have code that doesn't function correctly, and not have an indication as to why.

I'm not sure how you got into this state, I don't see the hidden terminals in scripting. And if you delete those wires, there's no way to get back to the hidden terminals. Also, I got a DWarn when I copied your snippet into my diagram. So I'd chalk this up to some weird corner case/corruption and move on.

There's also a recording of this presentation available here: http://bit.ly/brainlesslabview

There's a private 'Operate Menu Dismissed' event that may help in this situation.

Can you attach a simple write VI and read VI that demonstrate the issue?

It's impossible to change the label text of a subVI. That's why this works.

Yeah, I think the explanation given to me was that the contents of the .vim file on disk are no different than the contents of a .vi file on disk. So since it's technically not a different file type, they thought it didn't warrant a new enum entry. Kinda like how there's not a "Template VI" entry in the list since .vi and .vit are the same type on disk. I may be misremembering though so don't take this as the official answer.

It may surprise you that this is the best way:

You can also press Ctrl-Shift-E from an open VI to select that VI in the project explorer.

All of the functionality provided by the Icon Editor UI is also available programmatically with the LabVIEW Icon API, available here: [LabVIEW 20xx]vi.lib/LabVIEW Icon API This API, along with many others, is described in my Hidden Gems in vi.lib presentation.

There's more where that came from.

How come the diagram on the speaker has a backwards wire, an unnecessary coercion dot, and an obsolete analysis VI call?

It's not a G-based dialog, so to my knowledge, there's no way to launch it programmatically.

I wrote this nugget a long time ago, but the tips are still applicable: https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Darren-s-Weekly-Nugget-10-30-2006/m-p/434181

rolf's explanation is the best discussion of the string range rationale I've seen: https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Darren-s-Weekly-Nugget-03-09-2009/m-p/867644#M392955

Yes, that's right.

Another option is creating a lv_new_vi.vi in that same folder. This VI will override the behavior of pressing Ctrl-N. You can find the required conpane for the VI on labview wiki somewhere, but I think it's just 4x2x2x4 with an I32 in the upper right. Unfortunately (due to its age as a feature) it has no knowledge of application instances, and thus doesn't work properly when pressing Ctrl-N under different containers in the project window.

This is a C-based dialog, it does not have a G implementation that you can modify.

I don't know of a way to accomplish this. As discussed above, changing a VI with scripting requires the Transaction methods to preserve Undo history. To my knowledge you can't modify a VI with scripting, have that modification not show up in the Undo history, but preserve the previous Undo history.

I recently dealt with this issue when designing the LabVIEW Cloud Toolkit for AWS. I had to create a lot of new error codes, that mostly correspond 1-to-1 with the errors that AWS can return. My ultimate solution was that I had an Excel spreadsheet per class (Core, S3, SNS, SQS, IoT), and a build tool that parsed these Excel files and created a separate error text file for each class.

Assuming you're talking about the Data Type Parsing VIs in LabVIEW 2015 and later, you can read the documentation on them. Or you can watch my Hidden Gems presentation in which I describe some use cases for their predecessors, the VariantDataType VIs.

I'm not aware of any intentional changes in LabVIEW 2016 that would cause this. Please post the question to the LabVIEW forum on ni.com so an AE can investigate the issue and file a CAR if necessary.

Nope, I've never seen that before. You specify the name of a primitive, the thing that gets put on your cursor looks like a Place VI Contents VI of some kind, but then it drops a constant? Go home LabVIEW, you're drunk.

Maybe zip up all the logs every once in a while and send them to an AE? They're located here:[LabVIEW Data]\LVInternalReports\LabVIEW

I don't have a good answer for this. I run into the exact same issues, and I work at NI! For a while I would file CARs with a [hard to reproduce] tag on them, but I don't think anything ever came of those. I've heard of customers actually visiting NI and bringing their entire setup to get an AE to spend days troubleshooting issues like this, but I think that's overkill in almost all cases. One thing I can say...I've heard customer sentiment that it's not worth the time to submit NIER crash reports, but that's absolutely *not* true. With each LabVIEW release since NIER's debut, we've fixed *several* crashes as a direct result of the crash reports that were sent in. So continue submitting crash reports (and attaching code where possible and appropriate), because improving stability by solving NIER-reported crashes is something we're committed to with each release.