One practice which is increasingly debated in the community is the packaging of code for distribution and collaboration, and which tools to use.
I suggest that NI should define and maintain an open standard for distributing packages of LabVIEW artefacts (.vi, .lvclass etc).
And include a frontend to this in LabVIEW. This package manager should handle dependencies between packages and across LabVIEW versions and targets. The typical use cases would be:
- The distribution (online or shipped with labview) of:
- NI examples
- NI drivers
- NI toolkits
- The distribution of third party species of the above
There should also be an API so that applications can use this mechanism to be modular and extensible.
Cheers,
/MArcus