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On April 21, Eric Nielsen, Darren Jones, and I attended National Instruments LabVIEW Developer Day, an all day event which included intermediate and advanced LabVIEW training sessions, discussions of best practices for developing applications, and networking with other LabVIEW developers.

In the morning I attended the LabVIEW Design Patterns seminar, which gave an overview of several “tried and true” programming structures that can be easily implemented in LabVIEW. State Machines, Event Driven User Interfaces, and Producer Consumer Loop architectures were discussed, and examples such as a simulated vending machine were used to demonstrate the concepts. Object Oriented Programming in LabVIEW, a newer functionality added in recent versions, was also presented using the example of a generic “Printer” class.

A keynote address delivered by Jon Hildyard included a “sneak peek” of the next release of LabVIEW, codenamed LabVIEW Orion, which is scheduled to debut at NI week in August 2009. Reentrant VI’s for recursive math operations and a new Icon Editor are among the new features being developed. NI is currently adhering to a development schedule of releasing one new version per year.

Later in the day, I attended a seminar on Deploying LabVIEW Applications. Some useful information and tips for effectively building and controlling the runtime behavior of executables were given. Additionally, the seminar provided details on LabVIEW’s remote debugging feature, which allows any computer with the development environment installed on it to be used to perform step by step debugging of an executable application on any other computer on the same network.

To wrap up the day, both Eric Nielsen and I took the Certified LabVIEW Associate Developer exam, the first in a series of three professional certification exams administered by National Instruments to validate the programming abilities of LabVIEW developers.