Mark Balla

This is a Coding Challenge to rewrite the 3 button dialogue.vi. You can find the vi in National Instruments\LabVIEW 8.5\vi.lib\Utility\error.llb\Three Button Dialog.vi Or by navigating the pallets: Programming>>Dialog and User Interface>>Three Button Dialog.vi The background for how this challenge came about is found here The challenge is open to everyone, except me. Rules: When you have completed the 3 button dialogue.vi zip it up and send it to me in a PM. I will give the code an alias and post it to this thread. Submitters may not reveal their identity until the end of the challenge. I’m doing this so anyone including Aristos or Michael can submit to the challenge an it will still be fair for everyone. This will be an open discussion challenge if you have a comment about submitted code or about the challenge in general go ahead and post it to this thread. Please try to be positive. Let’s make this a 1 month challenge. All submissions must be in by 09-30-08. After that we will have an additional week of discussion and then I will post a poll to vote. The winner will earn the respect and adoration of his peers and they will have their code proudly displayed in the Code Repository. Of which I will personally assist in making sure it passes all the requirements. So if you don’t like the way the 3 button dialog is written or think you can do better then show us how it supposed to be done. REMEMBER DO NOT Post code to this Thread. PM it to me and I will post it.

QUOTE (jlokanis @ Aug 18 2008, 03:26 PM) In a previous life I had to interview and recommend for hire potential employees for our Mexico facility. First of all if at all possible have them bring code that they have written. If that is not possible then I would give them a small coding challenge to take home and email back to you. It made a big impact in determining what level they were at. The verbal interview didn't always reveal their strengths or weaknesses. Here is a list of Questions I used face to face [*]How long have you been programming LV? What is the largest project you worked with in LV? Do you use state machines in your code? If so what kind? Do you Document your code. If so what methods do you use? Do you use Ques or Notifiers in your code? If so how and when? Are you familiar with the event structure? How and where do you use the event structure? If you are stuck where do you go for help with LV.? What do you find is the most useful LV debugging techniques? What additional feature do you wish LV had? What thing bugs you the most when programming in LV? What is your methodology for solving a problem? Most of these don’t have an exact answer but they help determine where the person is at. Here is a simple coding test I used to used. There is an avi file that demenstrats how program should run. The demo vi shows them exactly how the vi should operate it's block diagram is locked so there is no cheating. If they have any question they can go back the demo vi and get the answer. The test vi has the FP items only. You might want to add some documentation requirements also. Skill Testing.zip

QUOTE (Tom Bress @ Aug 13 2008, 07:45 PM) I got my CPI last year at NI week and I am finally getting around to teaching my first LV Basics Class in Grand Rapids Michigan next week. My second class will be in Oak Brook Illinois 9-8 to 9-12. I've been teaching people LV for years one on one and now its time to share it with the masses. I'm excited yet a little nervous at the same time.

QUOTE (crelf @ Aug 13 2008, 01:32 PM) No sure how to do that. but until I can find a better fix here is the icon editor with the color selector removed. The standard color picker comes up instead. This is for 8.6 only. http://lavag.org/old_files/post-584-1218653056.vi'>Download File:post-584-1218653056.vi

Well it looks like the icon editor needs to be updated anyway. It currently locks up in 8.6 when you choose the color selector. see here apparently you can't call a subvi UI from the main icon editor. My guess is that the main vi is set to modal through LabVIEW. I took the icon template vi and used a primitive dialog and the user input express .vi When I ran it using the primitive it worked fine. but when I ran the input express .vi with the vi properties set to modal I was unable to enter data or press the ok button and the editor vi locked up. I had to press the X so the main would close and then the data input vi worked. I'm thinking this will have to be changed to a subpanel archatecture in order to view different subvis.

QUOTE (george seifert @ Aug 13 2008, 11:34 AM) yea that sucks!! The color selector is running behind the main panel. http://lavag.org/old_files/monthly_08_2008/post-584-1218646740.png' target="_blank"> The trouble is that even though the color selector is set as modal none of the front panel buttons work so it locks up. Something must have changed. I will play with this some more and see what I can figure out.

QUOTE (Michael_Aivaliotis @ Aug 12 2008, 02:22 PM) What do you mean by tiny does that mean LV icon 10 point lower case or LV 8 point. Isn't it hard enough to read the current compressd letters QUOTE (Michael_Aivaliotis @ Aug 12 2008, 02:22 PM) and auto-fit into multiple lines. Can someone add this? How is this different then how the icon editor works now QUOTE (Michael_Aivaliotis @ Aug 12 2008, 02:22 PM) Also, I think it would be awesome to combine all the features into one super LAVA icon editor. Super in functionality however simple and intuitive to use. There is the challenge. Adding features is easy, making them obvious and intuitive is the tough part. I like the Idea but I'm not sure a one size fits all aproach is the answer. It seems pretty obvious that everyone wants different features. I think a plugin archatecture might be a better fit here.

Due to the great feedback that I am getting I wanted to solicit Ideas from other members. The current version of the icon editor can be found here in the CR. An alternate icon editor that LAVA members prefer was created by ThSa on the NI forums (Dark side) and can be found Here If anyone has links to other icon editors that they use please post a link to them in this thread. I would like to collectively work on features to improve the icon editor. Initial thoughts: The Icon editor was not intended to do anything with graphics. So it will take some rearchitecting or creative thinking to add them to the program. The ability to take the icon and break it down into its text, frame, and color components is a very important function to me and adding graphics greatly complicates this. as a starter I like the idea of having selectable frames and maybe we could place a glyph in the corner only. All Ideas are welcome.

QUOTE (MJE @ Aug 4 2008, 03:41 PM) See if this http://forums.lavag.org/Improving-Code-Programmatically-building-a-cluster-than-can-be-unbundled-by-name-t9978.html' target="_blank">link helps you out.

QUOTE (pallen @ Aug 6 2008, 10:33 AM) It would help if I knew what you looked like.

QUOTE (Michael_Aivaliotis @ Jul 29 2008, 07:21 PM) OK to record my 10th NI Week I'm getting in on this Twitter thing here is my address

QUOTE (Darren @ Aug 2 2008, 11:28 PM) Exactly what are the rules going to be. How long will the contestants have to setup their LV environment and can they bring their own homemade tools? Also since most of us have only just seen 8.6 I think you shoud do the competition in 8.5 so the NI guys don't have an advantage.

QUOTE (mballa @ Jul 23 2008, 11:50 PM) My boss just gave me a load of these to give away at NI WEEK. So now if you find me you can have a handy dandy 2 blade screwdriver Hmmm... I wonder what JKI will be giving away this year.

QUOTE (Norm Kirchner @ Aug 1 2008, 02:56 PM) You can do this currently in 8.5 from the project tree. Your Xcontrol will look like this when you are editing When you are done go back and apply changes

QUOTE (iowa @ Aug 1 2008, 09:19 AM) Exe scripts are not the only way to use AutoIT!!! If you look on their webpage. it says they have DLL and COM (ActiveX) control. After AutoIT is installed you can access the functions using the Active-X Open and Invoke nodes Here is how to use AutoIT in LabVIEW Here are some vis to get you started. Download File:post-584-1217621205.zip

QUOTE (pallen @ Jul 31 2008, 03:44 PM) Maybe you could offer one up as a LAVA Bar-B-Q http://forums.lavag.org/LAVA-OpenG-NI-Week-2008-BBQ-Door-Prize-List-t11315.html' target="_blank">Door Prize

QUOTE (ScottC @ Jul 29 2008, 08:38 PM) Yes I am hoping to do one sometime in the next year. We are struggling trying to find a good idea that will be challenging creative and will have wide spread participation. We also are trying to avoid placeing too much burden on the volunteers that have to review all the submissions. I think that I have been too concerned about finding the perfect challenge in the past and so nothing has happened. I am planning to talk to Michael and others about this at NI WEEK and come up with a plan to get the Coding challenge going again.

Let us know if you are or are not comming to NI WEEK and what you are planning to do while your there. Also if you are Presenting please let us know so we can come and support you. I'm especially pump because this is my 10th NI WEEK in a row and each year gets better and better because of the people I get to see again and the new ones I meet. Arriving Sunday Staying at the Hilton Sunday Night: Ginger man Monday Night: Alliance day Party and Hopefully Buffalo billiards to school J.K.I. in foosball. ** !! Tuesday Night: LAVA Bar-B-Q of course ** !! Wednesday Night: NI Party ** !! Thursday Night: No Idea I've never stayed Thursday Night ** If you see a guy that looks like this with an LAVA button and big smile on his face please say HI I love meeting other members. **(minimum 1 trip to the piano bar and 2 trips to Coyote Ugly's) !! (Note to self don't play stupid drinking games with Norm and the barmaid too expensive)

QUOTE (iowa @ Jul 21 2008, 05:06 PM) I also use Auto It and love it. Mostly because it has Active X Drivers which make it work well with LabVIEW. I am planning to submit my AutoIt Vis to the CR sometime this year. I like the Idea of using the windows calculator as a demo example. I have posted my Win API set of keyboard emulation vis Here. There might also be some useful info Here. If you do come up with a usable set of Windows API vis please post them or put them in the CR. I know that many members would appreciate a good Windows API library.

QUOTE (Aristos Queue @ Jul 15 2008, 02:22 PM) I could set this up as the next coding challenge but I would need volunteers to help with the judging. If anyone is interested in judging and or participating please respond to this post. This sounds like a great NI WEEK topic over a few beers. Thanks Aristos you are still my Hero.

QUOTE (GraemeJ @ Jun 24 2008, 08:20 PM) Could you expand on what you mean by "could be controlled programmatically" What ultimately would you like this vi to do? Looking through the vi it looks like you are breaking up the aquired waveform into 2 separate (X Y) 60x10 2D arrays. You select (Current Index of the While loop???) one of the 60 rows of each array and append it to the current waveform. Acquire a new waveform and repeat the process. I would guess that you want to break up a single acquired waveform up into 60 segments of 10 seconds each. and display them on the graph but we need more information to help.

Here are the basic ones that I have from my archives. It looks like it is using the same dll call as yours but there is an enum or ring that stores all the key codes. There are also some demo programs to show how to do multiple key presses. Download File:post-584-1214364339.zip

I think it is important to note that the Class name and the Data type are not the same thing especially when dealing with numeric controls. Download File:post-584-1210175033.viI along with help from Aristos, developed a vi that helps categorize a control or indicator into a generic cluster so it can be compared to others. It is discussed this in this thread Here is the code that does the categorizing. Download File:post-584-1210175521.zip

QUOTE (EJW @ Apr 14 2008, 12:33 PM) I vote for Method #1 If you really only have 2 items in you Enum you could also use the select primitive. Also your Enum tells you already what method you are going to choose so you don't need to run the other subvi.

There are other examples of global stops Here