12-18 LabVIEW User Group Meeting Topics

[Craig_D]

Have something useful you'd like to present at the next user group? Have a question you'd like to ask the community? Post it in the comments and we will build our agenda for the 12/18 meeting based on what people write!

Here are a few ideas that others have brought up in previous UGMs / popular questions I get from customers:

• Upgrade best practices - How often to do technology refreshes. How to carry them out.
• Code Management & Deployment - Methods / best practices
• Reusing external code from other environments
• Functional Globals - What they are and how to use them
• Hardware Abstraction Layers (HAL) - How they work and why would you use them
• Developing for regulated environments - Methods and best practices
• Certification - How it works, what it gets you, and tips on passing
• Handy reference architectures / libraries / free toolkits - From LAVA, NI Systems Engineering, community examples, and shipping examples. Things you found useful that others may not know about.
• LabVIEW FPGA and Real-Time - Overview & best practices? This may be a side discussion for later as it's more specialized.
• LabVIEW Resources - Where you can go to learn about LabVIEW, get help, and find code.
• Coding Challenges - Stumped on how to make something work? Ask the community for their opinion!

Let me know which of these topics, or a topic not listed, may be interesting to you and we'll use it to build an agenda. Also, if you have something to share, or you see someone has posted a topic they're interested in learning more about that you know a lot about, speak up!

Regards,

-Craig

Craig Davis | Field Engineer - Wisconsin | National Instruments

[boone_93]

Unfortunately I'll be out of town 12/18, but in the interest of adding to the topics or expanding on ones listed:

• Build specifications - I find that there are quite a few subtleties when creating build specifications, how there are times when adding things to the executable build may be better than adding to an installer build.  I'd like to share what I've done in that past and hear from other peoples experiences.
• Free toolkits - Most people in the user group use OpenG, MGI, etc.  I'd like to have people show their favorite ones they like to use and some examples of how they use them in their code.
• Array, strings and other things nice - Another topic I'l like to see people show favorite or unique ways they like to code with these standard items or show some new problem you recently solved.  Maybe show some VIs they created to do a specific task they had to repeat.
• Your favorite home grown tools - This expands on the previous.  Everyone that codes LabVIEW for a while has some tools that they've developed to do some repeat tasks, maybe they even created a user.lib palette for them.  Show off some of your best and see if other people could offer tips on how to make them better or show something they did that was similar.

Just a few ideas that I would be happy to participate in.  Hopefully I'll see everyone for the next User Group after 12/18.

Later,

Dan

[jrayeske]

Building on Dan's suggestion, I have several home grown tools for communicating with various power supplies, environment chambers, etc. which are reused in multiple projects.  However, these are copied and pasted files, not libraries.  I would like to learn how to create a user.lib.

Regards,

Josh

[fporadek]

How about a meeting on best programming practices for developing reusable code modules?

- Frank

[Schrubbe]

As long as we are building on this subject, we could also get into best practices on keeping librarys up to date with the current version of LabVIEW without affecting past code. 

Nick

[Craig_D]

Here are the topics I think we'll move forward with:

• Best practices for creating reusable code
• How to: Create and use user.lib files
• Sharing best LabVIEW add-ons. Helpful code which is availabe in the community / sharing libraries you've developed.

Kamal Gupta has volunteered to lead the best practices for creating reusable code portion. Does anyone else want to volunteer to lead and/or share something specific on the topics above?

Thanks,

-Craig