Lycangeek

The Multiply primitive was having an existential crisis

A fellow developer here at National Instruments (Stephen) put together a hilarious story about a bug in LabVIEW. I strongly recommend it to everyone - lol. Is it a real story? I'll let you be the judge...

LV HTML Help

We have just released the LabVIEW documentation set as a searchable set of HTML pages. You can check them out here. Ryan is interested in hearing your feedback to any problems or suggestions - or, hell, even a compliment :) - so drop him a line here.

Windows Vista

The formal product name for Longhorn has been announced...Windows Vista.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/jul05/07-22LHMA.mspx

Sometimes I just wonder who is in charge with the names for Windows...

3.1, 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista....

LV, .NET and casting

When working in LV, casting between various data types can get kinda confusing as there are multiple models to choose from. When dealing with .NET, there are several options that work or kinda work. I thought it might be a good idea to summarize them.

That darn UI thread

When the graphical UI world hit the multi-threaded world, the decision was made to keep UI programming as simple as possible. This meant that all UI programming would remain single threaded. Of course, this simple concept quickly ran into the meat grinder of reality and event based programming. The results aren't pretty.

Why am I bringing this up? Well, there was a perfectly valid question posted on DevZone today about why one .NET dialog worked in LV 7 and another one didn't. The answer? The VI wasn't running on the UI thread.

Why does this matter for this dialog and not the other? Quantum Mechanics.

Welcome back Chance

I'm very pleased to report that our foster dog, Chance, has come back from his fearful state he fell into. It has been a bit of work to overcome whatever scared him last time, but we lept past his previous confidence level last night.

Hear me o'LV Users!

Well, today was a fairly busy day for .NET questions on the ol' Devzone board. That got me thinking about how little I actually know about what LV users are doing with the current support for .NET in LabVIEW 7.x.

So, if you are reading this blog and are a LV user, please post or email me with what you are doing with .NET and LV. What do you feel is missing? What is hard to do? What applications can you not create that you want to create? And, in the end, why are you using .NET.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a bit .NET fan. In my opinion, that is enough of a reason - lol. But it would help to get a sense of where we need to take the .NET support in the future.

Thanks in advance for taking the time.

A Zero Button Mouse

Windows computers have 2+ button mice. The Mac, I believe, is still running around with one button. What would life be like with a zero button mouse?

Well, I saw this site posted on an internal blog and thought I would help spread it around. Very interesting....

Important News for Aggregate Readers

IMPORTANT NEWS - If you are currently subscribed to my site via a news aggregator, the link for that subscription is changing. You'll notice a combined RSS/ATOM feed at the top right of my site now. Use this link instead of the old one. I'll be leaving the old link alive for a few days but then it'll be going away.

In case you're curious as to why, I'm switching my RSS/ATOM feed over to FeedBurner, which has a very intelligent system for feeds and can optimize the feed based on the reader. Quite clever. It also lets me know roughly how many people subscribe to my site. I'm mainly interested in that because I use the amount of traffic to my site to help promote the use of blogs to other NI developers.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Microsoft and Marvel

From the WinInfo newsletter - at first I was interested in the fact that MS has locked up a brand for its console. If you haven't heard, EA and TakeTwo Interactive have been battling it out with EA grabbing the NFL for a 5 year exclusive and ESPN for a 15 year exclusive! TakeTwo took MLB but I don't remember the terms there.

But I think it's even more impressive that Massive Online games are moving to the console. I'm personally a PC gamer and don't own a console. But I do believe that the line between what's a console and what's a “PC” is going to keep going away. Anyway, here is the piece...