Cat

Thanks for noticing, Jon and Shaun! I've posted a full report over here.

I thought I'd be able to slide in under the radar while everyone was off at NI Week. :-) It's been a long 8 months. I spent last fall and winter fighting chronic sinusitis (finally gotten rid of by massive and prolonged doses of antibiotics, steroids, and practically every OTC medicine you can think of. Drugs are our friends!). Then my Dad was sick and I was travelling back and forth across the country to see him. Then there was the funeral and all that to deal with... In the meantime, I had other groups clamoring for me to work on projects for them, and I find it really hard to say no. And the usual continual submarine stuff. So between ill health, personal travel, and work travel, I've had to keep my teeny little nose to the grindstone when I've actually been in the office. No time for playing professional development on LAVA. But I have a little breather, for the moment. Mostly just mopping up and dealing with ever-changing user requirements on previous projects. My big excitement this year was I actually got to play with hardware again, for the first time in years. Timing cards, A/D cards, etc. That was fun!

To give an example of what Shaun is talking about, I used to use ActiveX to get files in and out of Excel. Everytime MS Office changed or Windows OS changed, I would have to rewrite the ActiveX calls. Either something wasn't working anymore, or even worse, was working *differently*. I finally just told my users they would have to write config files in CSV format, and we've all been much happier ever since.

Well, Shaun, I threw you a soft ball and you lobbed it out of the park. Seriously, thanks for the comprehensive reply. Reading about Architecture Astronauts made me wonder if that's not part of my problem. I know I need to spend more time on upfront design, but at some point my attempts to keep my software generic and reusable have led me off into spending a lot of time getting more and more abstract in my design. And whenever I sit down to code it up, all that I can think is how overly complicated it all is. As I've said in the past, I don't sling the computer science lingo. So your point that I'm already using designs is a good one. I just don't generally say to myself, "I think I'll use a Producer/Consumer design pattern here." I say, "I ought to feed this loop that's doing a bunch of stuff on command with a queue in another loop." So thanks for all the links to the right names and algorithms. That's important to know.

I've talked to my local DSM, and to Nancy at NIWeek last year. Getting more people to take the advanced courses is the issue. Either that or Nancy just doesn't want to come to hot/humid or cold/rainy DC. I guess I should ping the DSM again. Oh, and the 2nd edition of "LabVIEW: Advanced Programming Techniques" is from 2006. Do you think they're working on a third edition??

If the OOP course was ever offered in the DC area, I would take it (ditto Advanced Architectures). I have LabVIEW: Advanced Programming Techniques, but it's the 2001 version. I'll see if I can get ahold of a copy of the newer version.

Thanks, I had found the "Design patterns" wiki page, but not the "Design patterns (computer science)" page.

Thanks for the link. One of the reasons I'm looking into all of this is because I have a large plug-in that is on the verge of becoming a Big Ball of Mud.

I would really like to find out more about the concept of design patterns. But every time I look at some reference, it's all within the context of OOP. And I don't do OOP ( ). I can't imagine that no one thought about design patterns before OOP came along or that design patterns aren't possible without OOP. Does anyone know of any books, websites, etc out there that talk about specific design patterns, without making the reader wade thru OOP?

Thanks for the link to the software. Unfortunately, I got the same negative results. I had actually played with a lot of these settings by hand using this article. The issue isn't aggregate TCP performance, it's that the TCP Read just seems to go to sleep every once in awhile for a really long time.

I actually got that to work this time. After about 3 tries. But I was hoping there was an easier way. You are The Man. Right, use with caution. In my case, I have an installer that pulls executables created in a bunch of different projects. This installer is in one of those projects. I'm in the midst of a big code cleanup effort and thought that it would be better to group all the projects (just the *.lvproj file) into a project of projects, and then put the installer there. I finally just ended up copying the project with the installation, deleting all the vis, and adding all the *.lvproj files. That left the original installation there, and more complete than after the xml cut-n-paste.

I feel like I've posted this before but can't find it anywhere... Occasionally, I would like to copy an exe or installer setup from one project to another. Is this possible? (I'm using 8.6.1)

Here's a little more efficient way to change multiple plot names: Also, the vi starts up with whatever the default plot name are set at. To permanently change the plot names, set them to what you want them to be, and then save the vi.

Is "Read from Text File" actually throwing an error? If so, what error is it reporting? How big is the file? If not, (sorry if this is obvious) I assume you know you can expand the "text" indicator coming out of "Read from Text File" and right-click on it to make a vertical scrollbar visible? This will allow you to see all the text.

And just to give yourself a warm fuzzy feeling, you can always check it by running your install on some other non-labview-installed machine and seeing what errors you get. I do that with all new installs.

Here's the bottom line from the AE at NI (Kyle, who has been very helpful): It appears that there is investigation being done into the TCP stack in LabVIEW, but it's still not clear if this is the cause of the problem. It's still possible that the problem may be the fault of Windows 7 and not LabVIEW. If there will be a fix for this, it will be a part of the normal patch release cycle. This means that any fix will be pushed live in 2012 at the earliest. We have verified, however, that the issue you're seeing only occurs with TCP loopback, and is not present in any other TCP scenarios. The important part, I guess, is that this issue shouldn't be affecting "regular" TCP usage. This isn't great for anyone else out there who might be thinking about using TCP to communicate with other applications on the same machine, however. Also from Kyle: The R&D folks working on this are very impressed by the amount of information they were able to start with. I want to again thank everyone who tested code on various platforms and offered suggestions, so I had all that information to pass on to NI. At this point, the ramdrive is working well, so that's what I'll stick with. Cat

Well, I do have to remember my purse. My car starts beeping at me if I leave the key in it when I get out. And it beeps wildly if I leave the car without turning it off. (tho, this isn't that difficult to forget to do when there is no engine noise)

Yeah, when I program around trying not to use locals and globals.

What was that black thing the guy was holding in his hand when he got in the car?? My key stays in my purse and never comes out. One of the many things I love about my Prius.

Excellent! I have to have the huge piece of code this will be integrated into working by monday, and will be out of the office until sunday, so I wasn't sure when I was going to find the time to do it. Thank you!

I was hoping that was the case. Thanks!

Well, right, tho I would probably use GlobalMemoryStatusEx, since it is overall system free physical memory that I am looking for. It, however, uses kernel32.dll and I'm going to have to keep my fingers crossed that it's going to work on a 64-bit machine (with more than 4GB memory). Looks like I'm going to have to dust off my notes on how to code up a Call Library Function node.

I am in dire need of a way to get the available physical memory on a 64-bit computer. I've always used lvwutil32.dll, but obviously that won't work on a 64-bit machine. I thought I had figured out a .NET widget to use for both 32-bit and 64-bit (System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounter-->Available Physical Memory). It works, but it is sloooooooow. Takes 30 seconds to do what lvutil32.dll would do in a couple seconds. I am admittedly a complete newbie at .NET, so I could be doing something wrong. I would love something that will work for both 32/64-bit, but at this point would settle for it just working on a 64-bit machine. Anyone out there have anything? Cat

You might want to ask this question in the appropriate forum over on the dark side.

You just need to liberally use "Create SubVI" in logical places. I'm generally pretty anal-retentive about the 1 screen BD rule. However, I have one vi that is such a humongous mass of spaghetti code I'm too embarrased to post it. It's about 6 screens. It already has almost 100 subvis and still needs more. At this point I'm looking at just rewriting the whole thing. If something gets that messy visually, there's a good chance it's messy logically, too.