LV8 Project Explorer

[Anu Kalidas]

Couple of days back I upgraded to LV8. The development enviroment looks really nice. But once I started using it I felt that its not as cool as it looks...particularly the project explorer window... Probably I will be able to appreciate the features once I start using it regularly...But I would like to know what other people think of the project explorer...Does it really make life easy( or complicated?).

One thing I would like to know is the reason for not creating a folder in the drive when you create a new folder in the project explorer window.

Also how helpful is the project explorer if one is using SVN which, I think, is not supported by LV8 SCC.

Regards

Kalidas

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Couple of days back I upgraded to LV8. The development enviroment looks really nice. But once I started using it I felt that its not as cool as it looks...particularly the project explorer window... Probably I will be able to appreciate the features once I start using it regularly...But I would like to know what other people think of the project explorer...Does it really make life easy( or complicated?).

One thing I would like to know is the reason for not creating a folder in the drive when you create a new folder in the project explorer window.

Also how helpful is the project explorer if one is using SVN which, I think, is not supported by LV8 SCC.

You bring up points which have been discussed already here on lava as well as info-labview.

I don't think you really want to tie the project hierarchy to a disk hierarchy. This puts up a strong limitation to what the project hierarchy can represent which is IMO not necessary. Other development environments like MS VC don't choose to synchronize the project hierarchy with any disk hierarchy either and I feel this to be a good choice.

SVN and all the other SCC systems are not directly supported in LabVIEW 8 but LabVIEW makes use of the MSSCC API. This is a closely guarded trade secret of MS and you only can get the specs by sigining a NDA. As such it is not very likely that there will be Open Source implementations of MSSCC interfaces soon. However you can get PushOk's SVN plugin (not open source or free though) discussed by Jim Kring in another thread on this board, which interfaces SVN to MSSCC compatible development environments and in this way LabVIEW is just as compatible to SVN as it is to other SCC systems such as MS VSS or Perforce.

The project explorer view is quite something to get used too, and it does have certain quirks at the moment which are sometimes just not intuitive and sometimes simply a bug. I expect most of these things to be ironed out in LabVIEW 8.1 ;-)

Rolf Kalbermatter

[i2dx]

my impression about project explorer / management is the following way:

first, it's still beta, and you have to get used to it, because some parts are not really intuitive ...

second, there is one "feature" which drives me crazy:

when you create a new VI in the project hierarchy and detect afterwards, that you don't need it, you cant close it if it's unsaved, only "defer decision" which leads to the following, when you close the project:

you have to uncheck "apply to all", discard all unwanted vi's manually, before you can save the rest in "normal way" ...

besides, i would expect some folder sync in the explorer window, too, maybe selectable e.g. "sync this folder to disc hierarchy ..."