My first go at writing a blog failed miserably after the first post. But as the saying goes, Try Try again. So here is my blog, Take 2.

I'm glad to say the xCE project, which I mentioned in my first post, has been completed very successfully, albeit not by me. It will be posted in the next few days on NI Developer Zone and I will write about it in an upcoming post. Search for it on ni.com in the mean time.

My time in the last few months has been occupied coordinating an update to the Machine Control Reference Architecture which we will publish for NIWeek. As part of this project I have updated the Queued Message Handler (QMH) design pattern and extracted the messaging piece into a separate Asynchronous Message Communication (AMC) reference library. It can be used to pass a variety of messages (commands, faults, alarms, status updates, etc.) between different parts of a LabVIEW application, including different LabVIEW targets connected by Ethernet.

My other area of focus recently has been deployment and replication of applications on the LabVIEW Real-Time and LabVIEW Touch Panel targets. I will be discussing this topic during NIWeek on Tuesday and will also be publishing a LV RT Application Deployment Utility reference application.

Going forward here I plan on highlighting and discussing different reference designs developed by the Systems Engineering group at NI and will throw in other random LabVIEW design and architecture topics.

If you see me at NIWeek, come say Hi. I'd love to talk with you about your applications.

Welcome to my Life on the Wire.

I'm not sure yet what aspect of LabVIEW life I want to document and comment on, but I figure I need to start where I am and then decide where I am going depending on the road ahead, my feelings of the day and possibly the weather out there in cyper space. Welcome and feel free to send me comments, feedback, and topic ideas that you're interested in.

I think my first direction will be to discuss my lack of knowledge of LVOOP and experience in learning/using LVOOP to implement a flexible and customizable configuration tool for LV applications (code name 'xCE'). I'm starting with the basic idea of the Tag Configuration Editor (TCE) and looking to expand it to handle more complex configurations (hierarchy, collections, etc.) and in addition enabling the developer to easily customize and configure their configuration editor by defining new item types using LVOOP. TCE for any configuration task => xCE.