Neil Pate

Can you post what you have done so far?

I was able to connect to an Azure IoT hub using a MQTT library and generating my own SAS token based on the following algorithm I found somewhere on a Microsoft site. This is my implementation. I struggled a long time with this until I figured out the Base64 decoding and encoding and URI encoding. For reference this is a typical SAS token (obviously URI and Key have been changed to protect my stuff) The SAS token is then used as the Password like this: Please note I am definitely not an expert here, I figured this out on my own so it is possible I am doing something terribly wrong!

I mean I needed some other analysis functions and these were also broken. At that point I was worried I would hit something I would not be able to recreate myself. The environment variable solved it straight away for me so I am not sure what is going on with your PC.

So I took the the same route initially and just implemented my own Mean.vi as it was trivial. Then something else broke and I realised it would be a game of whack-a-mole I could not win so went to solve the actual problem.

1. What type of source control software you are using? Currently use Git for my LabVIEW work with my repos hosted on github.com 2. You love it, or hate it? Love it. Sure there is a learning curve, but anything worth learning will take a bit of time. 3. Are you forced to use this source control because it's the method used in your company, but you would rather use something else My choice. I have gone down the path of Nothing-->Zips-->SVN --> Mercurial --> Git and am happy with git. I still have heaps to learn (even coming from pretty high competency with Mercurial), but I am treating this as an opportunity to get better. 4. Pro's and Con's of the source control you are using? Pro: Lot's of resources out there to help me when I screw up. Git is ubiquitous now. I love the GitKraken client! Con: Some of the things still confuse me a bit, especially how local and remote can have different branches. 5. Just how often does your source control software screw up and cause you major pain? I don't think I have ever actually lost work or been caused major pain because of my misuse of source code control. Certainly I have made mistakes but have always managed to recover things. Contrasting this, I still sometimes lose stuff when I am being careless with documents that are not yet under any kind of control In a nutshell I could not live without Source Code Control as a regular part of my daily workflow.

Would love to see your more sophisticated testing, especially the holding state data.

Sure. But doing dev work on your own PC could then be potentially problematic if you have to support multiple different projects and implementations. I do expect the native node to get better as time progresses and python slowly strangles all other languages.

Having the Status visuals as a tick or a cross but represented by a boolean. After 17 years of LabVIEW development I still make mistakes when using the error Status boolean and forget that a True means "Error Present".

Docker? Nope that's not at all related to this. I mean Project Dragon.

So again I am definitely not an expert but my understanding is that a virtual environment is like a small sandboxed instance where you can install packages and generally work without affecting all other python code on the system. I guess it's like nuget. If you don't use a virtual environment when you install packages it affects the global python installation on your machine. Seems like pretty sensible stuff (and hopefully what Project Dragon will do for LabVIEW). However I have not been able to get the native python node to work with a virtual environment.

Nice question James! I have tried to go down this route myself and had a very similar journey. In the end I have decided to stick with VS Code for Python dev work as it seems to be gaining so much traction and is improving at a great rate. None of the python connectors I tried worked very well. I would prefer to use the native one but it does not seem to support virtual environments which is what seems to be the preferred way of doing things in Python. In the end I rolled a simple TCP/IP client/server solution and was planning on using that to get data to/from Python. But. I have no real experience with this so am going to shut up now for the rest of this thread and read every one else's answers with interest.

This sounds nice, thank you for organising it! I think the points reward for participating needs to be higher though as currently you can get 5 points for attending a user group. I would expect to actually get a working solution would be quite a bit of time.

I have never really trusted breakpoints on wires like this, especially going to indicators. I prefer structures/primitives/VIs. I suspect if the breakpoint was on the outside of the top while loop it would break correctly. Still seems like a bug though.

I had no idea there were so many out there! http://blog.interfacevision.com/design/design-visual-progarmming-languages-snapshots/

Sorry, in the older version you have to do it manually using property nodes.

You can toggle it here: Then each plot can be individually turned on or off

The graphs have a built in ability to allow the plots to be turned on/off at runtime. I think the option is hidden by default and might be called something like Visibility, that will probably solve your problems (1) and (2).

Check this out https://fabiensanglard.net/gebb/index.html I just wish I had time (and the brainpower!) to do a deep dive.

I too have a sprinkling of Win32 calls I have wrapped up over the space of many years. Most are pretty simple helper stuff like bringing a window to the front or printing or getting/setting current directory etc. No rocket science here.

Obviously I don't know what I am talking about, but could this in the future be used to simplify configuring Win32 API DLL calls in LabVIEW? https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/01/21/making-win32-apis-more-accessible-to-more-languages/

I totally get you wanting to display newer entries first, but surely this is just a presentation issue and should not be solved at the file level? I really think you are going against the stream here by wanting newer entries first in the actual file on disk. It is almost free to append a bit of text to the end of a file, but constantly rewriting it to prepend seems like a lot of trouble to go to. Rotating the log file is a good idea regardless though. Notepad++ has a "watch" feature that autoreloads the file that is open. It is not without its warts though as I think the Notepad++ window needs focus.

That is good to hear.

Tangentially, I use Plastic SCM at work (Unity/C# dev), it really hits the sweet spot of easy to use but powerful DVCS. I believe it is modelled on Git but designed to trivially handle many branches.

OK, so deleting the branch on the remote only deletes it from being used in future, it still exists in the past and can be visualised? Sorry I misunderstood and thought that git did magic to actually remove the branch in the past (which would be a bad thing). I know about rebase but have never thought to use it.

I still don't really get this. I want to see the branches when I look in the past. If the branch on the remote is deleted then I lose a bit of the story of how the code got to that state don't I?