Lycangeek

WinFX is everywhere

As I said in my NITS presentation (see previous post), WinFX is the new Win32 and is going to be the basis for most new features (as well as slowly integrating the older Win32 APIs). The great thing about LabVIEW is that you can incorporate these new APIs into your LabVIEW programs with the .NET integration we've already provided (8.0 or 7.1.1 with the f2 patch). Of course, WinFX is not yet released, but you can download a preview if you want to play with it.

Over the holidays, I caught up on some reading and found an interesting article in the MSDN magazine about WinFX. Did you know that the most recent voice generation and detection algorithms out of MS research are going to ship as part of Windows Vista? That means you can use them via their WinFX APIs from your LabVIEW code. Again, you have to wait until Q3 of 2006 to get the released versions, but you can starting looking at it now.

If you do play around with LabVIEW and WinFX, drop me a line and let me know what you think. I've done a little playing around myself, but I'm curious to see what you are doing.

NITS Presentation

Sorry for the delay, but I've finally gotten my slide deck up on the site. This is just the little 20 minute presentation I did in Portland and Seattle on why .NET is important to LabVIEW users. The demo I did is actually the event log, which I've already posted about here and here.

Seattle NITS

As you can probably guess from the date, I'm back in Austin now. Boy, that was quite a tour around the NW...I already miss it, but I'm glad to be back.

The Seattle NITS went even better than Portland in my opinion - but that is probably because I didn't forget to install the .NET framework this time *laugh*. Again, a lot of very good questions - even more than Portland. In fact, after my .NET presentation, I answered questions until the next session, then went into the hall and continued answering them. That is a great feeling.

So I'm back and almost done digging myself out of the backlog of stuff from the last two weeks. Whew...

I'm hoping to give some more "useful" posts in the near future - maybe during the Xmas holidays when everyone else is out of the office (family in town this year so I'm not taking many days off). So, if there is anything you'd like to see, drop me a line.

Northwest Update

So, Sunday was another great day. It involved driving across the Snoqualime Pass to eastern Washington for a site seeing trip. On the way back in we stopped at Rattlesnake Lake for some hiking - made it almost all the way to the top before turning back (sun was setting and you don't want to do that in the dark)...try it again next trip. The hike was wonderful even if we didn't make it all the way.

Monday was not as exciting - dropping the wife off at the airport and driving down to Portland. This was followed by setting up for the NITS demos and trying them all out. Finally got back to the hotel where a lot of email awaited me. Got to bed on Tuesday.

Today was NITS Portland and it went very well. A large crowd with lots of good questions. My presentation, I'm glad to report, actually went off without Murphy showing up to cause grief. In fact, the only problem I had the entire day was my Expert Panel presentation on .NET and LabVIEW where I had forgotten to install .NET on the main computer...dooh! Luckily I was able to switch to my laptop to give the demo and all was well...mostly well anyway. Then the tear down and back to the hotel. One more time in Seattle and then I can go home! I love the NW but I do miss my own bed...

LabVIEW Docs

As I've mentioned before, we have a blog by Ryan (and now the rest of the LV doc team) about the challenges of documenting LabVIEW. This is a great post with an important question that I'd like you to take a look at, and comment on if you can. This is exactly the kind of information we are always craving from our customers.

Let it snow, let it snow

Well, it's now Sunday and there's still snow out the window. It's stopped falling, but it hasn't gone away out here in Snoqualmie. Yesterday, we took a wonderful walk out into the woods and snow and had just a wonderful time. We even crested a ridge where we could see the Snoqualmie Falls (if you ever watched Twin Peaks, then they're the falls and hotel that you see for the main hotel in the show).

Work-wise, on Friday, I was at Microsoft again, but this time visiting a customer using LabVIEW and PXI for testing the XBox 360 controllers. It was really interesting seeing the various game ads and cardboard cutouts all over the place.

A last little bit of travel news - we went to a housewarming party for some friends of our friends. There were nine people for an amazing sitdown dinner (apparently the hostess is well known for these amazing feasts) and some wonderful conversation. The most interesting part to me was talking with a guy who grew up in Windsor Castle (the English Queen's residence)...not around, but in the castle! His father is a horse expert and works with the queens horses - and lives on the grounds. It was fascinating listening to him talk about being a young boy, running around the castle with the other young boys living there, being chased by the castle police *laugh*

MD5 Support

For those looking to do checksum style verifications, and looking at MD5, you should check out the following post. Seems that pbrooks was able to move to the .NET MD5 implementation from LabVIEW to handle large files and obtain good performance. Thanks to pbrooks for bringing this to my attention.

Back in Seattle Again

Well, we arrived in Seattle yesterday and pretty much headed directly out to our friend's house in Snoqualmie. My wife and I arrived close to rush hour, and after the flight and the drive, we weren't really up for much.

But today was wonderful. In a very unusual event, we had a lot of snow coming down, with large flake snows floating down gracefully throughout most of the day. It was a great way to ring in December. For those that don't know, Seattle is very wet during the winter months but rarely gets snow, hence the little victory dance I did this morning *laugh*.

The day itself was mostly spent on the Microsoft campus meeting with a variety of folks, and ended with a dinner with the NI sales folks in the area, along with their spouses. Whew - a very good start to trip - but I'm looking forward to bed...I'll talk to you all again tomorrow.