Announcing the LabVIEW 2010 Platform beta

[ErnieH]

Just make sure that the next version can peacefully coexist with the current version AND toolkits on my development PC. Coexist to me is don't modify what I have now. Otherwise, it will be 2009 for the next 5 years. Too many apps distributed to update and fix the minor tweaks needed between versions.

[Dennis_Knutson]

If it's a concern of yours, apply for the beta and test it yourself.

[ErnieH]

Are the beta versions already isolated from the normal versions? If so, that would not give me the information I need anyway. If that is true and they can isolate it for beta versions, why not regular versions? Just simply requesting that the new version not screw up my current version.

[Dennis_Knutson]

Beta versions are as much isolated as the normal versions. New versions can be installed side by side with existing versions. You do not provide any details so I have no idea what you consider 'screwed up'.

[RDR]

You could also make use of a virtual machine to perform beta testing, there are a few companies/orgs out there with solutions...(VMWare, Virtual PC, Virtual Box, etc)

[ErnieH]

Mainly its the toolkits and addons we have trouble with. In the past, those have been the main problem areas on upgrades. They have greatly improved that over the years. I am hoping that for 2010, that I can load it without any issues concerning 2009 on my machine. I have looked at virtual machines and considered that option. What we decided to do is upgrade everyone to 2009 and use it. If we can seamlessly add 2010 to our machines, we will. If not, we won't. If there comes a time we have to upgrade, we will keep a PC available for older programs. Just wanted to express this to NI.

[REM1]

The beta version is installed into the same directory that the released version will be.  LabVIEW versions are installed into seperate directories but there are some shared components that will be upgraded when you install a new version.  You can get a fairly good idea what these things are by looking in the shared folder inside the National Instruments installation folder.

[Oskar_Bosch]

It is interesting to see NI attempt to come up with new version of labview as fast as they do.

Labview used to be a very solid environment. Up to labview 7.1.1.

With 8 and now 9 it seems we are seeing the need for features, and less robustness.

This is concerning and makes us look at alternatives, like the .net programming families (C#, C++, etc...).

Will not like to give up labview as we have a lot of code invested in that platform.

We are faced with a huge dilemma:

1/ it is difficult to find labview programmers. Yet C# or C++ programmers are readily available.

2/ Feature wise labview is always behind compared to the .NET environment. Making integration with other libraries difficult.

3/ Now we are seeing issues show up more then I would like. We have application building issues with 8.6.1. So had to go to version 2009 (or just 9 if you like). Now we are seeing numerical difference between different processors. What is next? And how do we fix all these bugs....

More and more tempting to jump to a more commonly used platform. Just for stability perspective. hhhmmm. 

[Coq_Rouge]

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Oskar Bosch wrote:

It is interesting to see NI attempt to come up with new version of labview as fast as they do.

Labview used to be a very solid environment. Up to labview 7.1.1.

With 8 and now 9 it seems we are seeing the need for features, and less robustness.

This is concerning and makes us look at alternatives, like the .net programming families (C#, C++, etc...).

Will not like to give up labview as we have a lot of code invested in that platform.

We are faced with a huge dilemma:

1/ it is difficult to find labview programmers. Yet C# or C++ programmers are readily available.

2/ Feature wise labview is always behind compared to the .NET environment. Making integration with other libraries difficult.

3/ Now we are seeing issues show up more then I would like. We have application building issues with 8.6.1. So had to go to version 2009 (or just 9 if you like). Now we are seeing numerical difference between different processors. What is next? And how do we fix all these bugs....

More and more tempting to jump to a more commonly used platform. Just for stability perspective. hhhmmm. 

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Labview has since it was introduced taken marked shares in the instrumentation segment (and others also) from more conventional text based languages. But now I think the tide has turned. This is somewhat complex but I think many of the argument from Oskar will apply. I also think how Labview has been marketing has something to do with it. They have emphasized on that Labview is so easy to use. That everybody may after short time write an application. Well everybody may whip together some Labview code after a short time. But this code is very often full of Labview no-no type code. As often seen in this forum. And such code may work, but only up to some complexity level. Then it will fail. And the Labview customer will be disappointed and dump it, or at least not upgrade it. I have said it before in this forum. Labview is actually a quite complex program language that takes a lot of training(programming) to master.  

[walterd]

I am very disappointed about Labview for Linux and I have noticed that this new beta version is still not making any substantial changes for Linux. I don't think NI should       

 sell this software for Linux, the level of support and the quality compared to the Windows version is very poor. Unfortunately we have a project where we need LabView in conjuction with other java and c++ codes, we are having a  real hard time to find a decent way to communicate data from java or c++ to labview and we are forced to use only sockets. What we need is to bind object on the screen with data changing dynamically in java. Any possible option such as datasockets , shared variables , http is only working for windows and it is really frustating to see that even the new beta version has nothing useful for Linux. The cost of the license for linux is exactly the same as windows and I think that this is really stealing money since the performance for such platform are really poor. If anyone in this forum has got a nice experience on linux with labview and would like to share his/her experience with I'll be happy to listening. At the moment I would not reccommend anyone to use Labview on Linux and I strongly reccommend NI to stop pretending to support linux while in reality is not.