LabVIEW Life Lessons #1 - Project Portability

[swatts]

What-ho wire-makers.

Welcome to my new series of short articles, each one will be about something that we've learnt over many years of writing industrial software.

Today it's all about project portability. Time spent making your project portable is time well spent. At SSDC we like to be able to download a project onto a Laptop, Virtual Machine or customer machine from our repository and for it to work.

This means........

Keep all referenced data and libraries relative.

Remove external dependencies.

Minimise use of Instr.lib and User.lib

For us the project is a directory that wraps around the LabVIEW project containing everything pertaining to the project, source code is only one part and our projects can contain multiple LabVIEW projects.

And because we are using the directory structure of the filing system we don't use virtual folders in our LabVIEW Project. I think that may make us bad people for some reason I can't fathom.

So here's our Project

The test for portability is one of our code review items and involves exporting the repository into a clean virtual machine (with LabVIEW Loaded) and into different directories (usually desktop and \User\Public\Something or other.

Doing this has saved us a lot of hassle over the years.

Lots of Love

Steve