What should a LabVIEW programmer know about .NET

[James P. Martin]

Hello to all

I am a student & a LabVIEW user and I have came to know that .NET is a

useful tool if you are a LabVIEW programmer.

I need soome guidance , that Should I learn the .NET and if yes then in

what ways it is going to help me(a LabVIEW user) and what exactly

should I learn in .NET.

I am a student who needs some guidance so please forgive me if anybody

dont likes my query.

Thanks&Regards [/b]

[mross]

Why do you think you need .NET? What sort of work do you anticipate?

I have been using LV for acquisition and analysis for 4 years now and have never needed .NET. If you are just starting out, I think you should concentrate on other core skills first. Best thing I ever learned after how to aquire and process data was the producer consumer form of event driven queued state machines.

Mike

[Phillip Brooks]

What is Microsoft .NET?

Microsoft .NET is the Microsoft strategy for connecting systems, information, and devices through Web services so people can collaborate and communicate more effectively. .NET technology is integrated throughout Microsoft products, providing the capability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, security-enhanced solutions through the use of Web services.

LabVIEW already has various methods for connecting systems and sharing information; VI Server, Shared Variables, OPC, etc...

I've been looking at .NET in my spare time. There are numerous collections related to the OS that can be called in a much simpler method than in the past. An example would be calculating an MD5 hash for a particular file. MD5 is often used to validate a file for execution or download into a piece of hardware. I recently read about .NET support for MD5, had a project that could benefit from this sort of check, and had also just downloaded LabVIEW 8 from the NI web site. I put together a few LV .NET nodes, and could calculate the MD5 for the LV8 454MB file in under a minute.

Could it be done natively from within LabVIEW? Of course! Selecting how an where to perform a calculation is a design choice. If I used LabVIEW for LINUX, I would likely use a 'md5sum' function call to the OS rather than writing it myself in LabVIEW. If I implimented the MD5 algorithm myself and did it incorrectly, I might have a problem regardless of which platform I used.

In general, .NET is not of great value from the traditional Aquire, Analyze, Present standpoint of LabVIEW. .NET offers easier access to the OS, rather than having to Google "win32.dll" and "wininet.dll" and create Call Library Function nodes that will fail and crash your LabVIEW session.

My .NET MD5 programming example

I've also started reading this blog; Lycangeek - And now a word from Brian Tyler. Brian heads up the .NET development for LabVIEW at NI.