Distributing code and re-use libraries can be a surprisingly difficult task. Luckily for us, our friends at JKI have come up with an extremely elegant and professional solution for LabVIEW called the VI Package Manager. If you’ve never heard of this tool, I strongly encourage that you check it out. In addition to making code management easier, VIPM lets you download all the OpenG libraries, which adds some very useful functionality to LabVIEW.
To understand when VIPM is especially useful, consider several common examples of when you want to distribute your code:
These all seem simple enough, but now lets throw a wrench in the works with a few common tasks:
As you’ve probably already guessed, these are some of the biggest challenges that VIPM is designed to help with.
There are two flavors of VIPM: the professional version facilitates creation of ‘VI Packages’ and the free version enables anyone to install and manage these packages. You can download packages from a number of places online, or VIPM can automatically scan dedicated servers to see what’s available. I’ve also spoken with a number of LabVIEW users who are using the professional version of VIPM to distribute code internally during development.
As an example, Simon recently posted a set of custom controls for use in LabVIEW. Minutes after making them available, Jim had created a package and posted it on the document, which made installing them in LabVIEW a breeze. A few clicks, and the swanky new controls were in my controls palette.
ni_lib_ni.com_inspired_controls-1.1.0-1.vip
These were updated a few times, and each time I just downloaded the package and VIPM took care of replacing the old controls.
Download VIPM and give it a try yourself. Thanks to JKI for making such a great tool!
Originally posted by ekerry at http://ekerry.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/vipm-makes-managing-re-use-libraries-in-labview-easier/
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