Lycangeek

Unmanaged Assemblies

If you're looking closely, you might think that unmanaged assemblies is a contradiction in terms. Assemblies are generally considered .NET constructs, and the term unmanaged means Not .NET. However, with the introduction of Visual Studio.NET 2005, Microsoft has extended the concept to include your regular old C DLLs.

Let's first take a look at what this new concept is, and then we'll look at how this impacts LabVIEW developers.

Time to tell us what you think

I'm very excited to announce a new forum at the DevZone, specifically for you to give us feedback on future feature ideas for LabVIEW - any part of LabVIEW, not just .NET. Let me give the standard disclaimer...

The topics we post are the property of NI - so don't give away some idea you are planning on patenting or something. It also isn't a promise by NI to do the feature, your idea, or implement anything by any given date.

That being said, we wouldn't be posting if we didn't think the ideas were important so we really, really, really want to hear from you!

If you're curious, here's the text from the DevZone link

The LabVIEW Developer Feature Brainstorming Forum is the latest feature to help LabVIEW R&D engineers solicit direct feedback on new features and technologies under consideration. You can now help provide direct feedback on these potential features that may be under consideration for a future version or may be in active development. Through this new forum the NI engineers will solicit feedback to make design trade-offs and they will hold virtual brainstorms with you on potential LabVIEW features.

Remember the Details

I went to see Lily Tomlin at the Paramount the other night. The show was a lot of fun, and she had several great one-liners. But one in particular stood out, so I thought I’d share it with you…

I always wanted to be someone, and then I realized I should have been more specific.

Windows Vista

One of my jobs here in the LabVIEW team is to ensure that we're ready for the upcoming Windows Vista release. Microsoft is making a ton of changes to the operating system, including security settings, user interface, APIs, etc. and we are making sure that you can use the latest version of LabVIEW with this new operating system.

Currently, there isn't a general-availability beta for Windows Vista, although it should be showing up within the next few months. When it does, I'm curious how many of you out there are going to be giving it a try. If you do plan to try out Vista, please drop me a line and let me know - I'd love to work with you.

LabVIEW 8 and Arrays

Some people have run into an unfortunate bug in LabVIEW 8 and the .NET support, so I thought it would be helpful to post the workaround.

If you've ever dropped a .NET invoke node that takes an array in 8, you may have noticed that it's an input only parameter. Actually, it is so it seems to be correct. The problem is that, due to the automatic data handling we do, the array you wire into the node is copied into .NET.

The problem? If the array is modified as part of the method, then there is no way to see the result.

The solution? Well, we're working on a fix so that you'll have both an input and output array terminal, but until then...