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LabVIEW 2010 - Improved Performance, Improved User Experience

NI announced the newest version of LabVIEW 2010 at NIWeek - and I'm pleased with what I see. While there are some new useful features, I am most impressed by the parts you can't see- improvements to the engine, the installer, and the overall experience. LabVIEW 2010 promises to be a more robust version than we've ever had, and so far it has delivered on that promise.

You'll see one of the big changes as soon as you start installing LabVIEW 2010. Instead of entering all of your serial numbers, the installer will scour your existing installation to find out what you own. It will then select the packages from the DVD to install based on what you own (no more sorting through dozens of installer options), and then install just those packages.

On the first splash screen, you'll see an improved navigation to instrument drivers and example programs. There are lots of new examples to show the new features, so this is a great way to find them.

Several of the new features came from the LabVIEW Idea Exchange . This site gives our LabVIEW users the ability to suggest, then vote on, features that will improve the LabVIEW experience. For LabVIEW 2010, the features that made the release include Wire Labels, changing the default number of Undo steps, a redesign of local variables, a Radix on string constants, Growable Merge Error nodes, viewing clusters as an icon, and swap items in the connector pane. Visit the exchange and vote for features in the next version!

But the major push in LabVIEW 2010 seems to be performance. Changes were made to the engine in LabVIEW 2009 that provides a new platform for the programmers to dramatically improve the engine that powers LabVIEW. LabVIEW 2010 uses a DFIR and LLVM to optimize your code, both graphically and at a lower level, by removing dead and unreachable code, optizing loop invariant code, and SubVI inlining. Too hard to describe here, you can learn more about these technologies at this white paper:  http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/11473.

You can improve performance by setting iteration schedules on parallel For Loops, allowing you to analyze large arrays in parallel rather than sequentially.

There are many other new features as well, which are listed in the LabVIEW help file, which can be found online. You can also request an online demonstration of the new features with our application engineers, or you can contact a member of our Northwest team. We are preparing a good set of demonstrations, whcih would be appropriate for a group of engineers at your company. Youc an also download the What's New in LabVIEW 2010 presentation.

If you use LabVIEW 2010, please post your comments here- what do you like? What's missing? Are you seeing improvements in your performance?

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