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What's New in LabVIEW 2011: Accelerate Your Productivity


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I love how both the graph in this article and the one presented at NI Week have no Y-Axis labels. Also love the bar graph during the Tuesday keynote that was only upwards trending. No title or labels. Don't get me wrong, a lot of the features seem cool. It's just hard to buy into a better bug reporter as a key feature...

Paying for bug fixes by being forced to upgrade has always been my major criticism of NI (what about my 2010 and 2009 installations?). I would also question if many of the speed improvements are really much faster than 2009. 2010, yes. That was a slug. But compared to 2009? Maybe in some circumstances (FPGA?), but I haven't seen many yet. Personally, now I have had a chance to play with it, I don't think there is much in it from a user experience point of view. From an execution view point, I have seen 1 instance where 2011 x32 was faster and 2011 x64 was slower than 2009 and all the rest about the same for identical code. I have already commented previously that 2010 was about 3x slower at compiling, loading and saving than 2009 so when the "selling" point is speed and stability. Is it worth paying thousands for a more stable 2009? (Well. It is since, the bugs in 2009 won't get fixed ph34r.gif)

If you ask me (I know your not...but I'll pretend anyway biggrin.gif). One of the biggest improvements that I would have paid a ton of gold for (in recent history) was never a major selling point.- 32 AND 64 bit compilers. Although I can still find something to moan about with those toowink.gif

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That an interesting perspective -- and exactly the opposite of mine so far, esp around the user experience. All of the features from the Idea Exchange that were implemented were great improvements and I really love the Asynch Call functionality. It's always easy to find stuff to be disappointed about but I'm very happy with 2011 so far, esp knowing what R&D has been up to for the last development cycle. Time to start finding and submitting "bugs", Idea Exchange items, etc so that they get considered for the next go round. NI has shown that they are responsive: MANY users wanted "stability" over "new features" and IMO that is what they got in 2011, and still got some important new features. yes.gif

But your mileage may vary...

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They do claim some good improvements regarding FPGA. I'm excited to try these out. Perhaps I won't have to schedule my lunch around compiles anymore.

I do agree tremendously though that moving to a new version can have dramatic effects on existing projects. Especially when the customer has their own LV license and plans to do work on their own. Stung me a bit when I got an SSD and only had 2010 on it.

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My point is that you shouldn't have to pay for stability and upgrading to a new version is not a bug fix, it is a project risk.

I understand that point, however, IMO this wasn't a "bug fix". There are new features, and several are really outstanding. There are speed improvements (most notably for FPGA but nonetheless elsewhere as well), and functional extensions re: how the Project works to support builds, etc.

As I say, one can always find things to complain about but FWIW I'm very happy. Then again a lot of people in the NI community do see me as being just a bit odd. wink.gif

In any event, now it's time for beer_mug.gif maybe beer_mug.gifbeer_mug.gif or beer_mug.gifbeer_mug.gifbeer_mug.gif.....

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I'm fairly sure that the Open VI Reference primitive still has the root loop requirement, so if you're using that to get the reference just before running the VI, you would still have the same issue.

Yes but the issue can be eliminated for many use cases. Since the new ACBR nodes allow you to reuse the same refnum, you can most likely open references to any required VIs during application initialization and hang onto them for the lifetime of the application. This of course assumes you're not dynamically loading to reduce memory footprint, in which case you're still out of luck.

Edited by mje
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I am very pleased to see that NI is integrating large application tools into the Developer Suite:

  • What's New in NI Developer Suite
    • "All Developer Suite customers will now receive the latest versions of LabVIEW VI Analyzer Toolkit, LabVIEW Desktop Execution Trace Toolkit and the LabVIEW Unit Test Framework. These professional development toolkits will make it easier to design high-quality and reliable systems with LabVIEW and NI products through the application of standard software engineering and validation practices."

More features have been enabled from a LabVIEW base package:

  • Viewing and Controlling Front Panels Remotely without a License
    • In previous versions of LabVIEW, you need a license to view and control front panels from remote computers, and the license grants only a limited number of remote connections to front panels. In LabVIEW 2011, you can view and control front panels remotely without a license, and you can connect to remote front panels an unlimited number of times.

My only wish at this point is for a Developer Suite DS2 ISO image to be posted. It is a pain to install the individual packages compared to the DevSuite installer. Is there any rhyme or reason when and if NI publishes this ISO?

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My only wish at this point is for a Developer Suite DS2 ISO image to be posted. It is a pain to install the individual packages compared to the DevSuite installer. Is there any rhyme or reason when and if NI publishes this ISO?

I too would love for them to just put the iso's online. In addition to the annoyance of manually installing a dozen packages, I always seem to miss something.

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I played with the desktop execution trace toolkit and the unit test framework. I've been wanting something like this for ages, but never saw it as a justifiable expense given all the other application's I already have to maintain licenses for. I'm so happy I get to use them now with the developer suite. These tools are invaluable and I always thought it was an awful decision on the part of NI to not include them with their higher end development systems.

I only wish I had access to the unit test framework three months ago when I was assembling document trails and closing out our defect database...

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