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How do I make a program that doesn't need to be installed?

Since LabVIEW is free for students, I don't get your point. I can't speak for other areas, but all of the colleges/universities near me use LabVIEW when using real hardware - DAQ, GPIB, RIO, etc.
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Message 31 of 42
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The Student Addition version is available for $58.95, so there is college attempt here.  Right now, it appears that MATLAB/Simulink is doing a better job.  But as far as personal/hobby use - it is non-existent.

 

I just talked with a new engineer, from University of Maine - EE/CE degree, never heard of LabVIEW... until I introduced it to him in my office.  He has heard of Simulink.

 

You know, I should do a survey within my department, lets see where all of this really sits.  And I should look at this Simulink thing.  My work is more hardware and network system simulators, so LabVIEW rules here.

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Message 32 of 42
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It is free for 6 months. The price you mention is only if you want a longer time copy. Since none of us work for NI and don't have access to sales figures, all of this is mere speculation.
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Message 33 of 42
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Not arguing with you here.  My survey would be real world, concrete, and gives an idea of market penetration in the college-shere.  I have heard more of Simulink usage in the past couple years, and none about it for the 18 years prior.  This is my experience.  Also type of work has a lot to do with this.

 

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Message 34 of 42
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Yes, type of work is a major consideration.

One way to judge the number of users of each is to look at the number of posts to the NI and Matlab forums. I only see a fraction of the number of posts to Matlab compared to LabVIEW. I don't believe this is because Matlab is easier to use.
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Message 35 of 42
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OK so a bit of double checking on my part

 

MatLab V1.0 = 1984 Simulink first appears as an addon in 2002 (About when I got introduced to it)

 

Yes Mathworks does offer deeply discounted Home/hobby option - but you can't sell the products (Or even distribute them.  if I recall correctly, they only run on the one machine with your key)

 

So for a single seat Personal License of Mathworks Products configured simillar to a LabVIEW Embeded Control and Monitoring Suite will cost you North of 28kUSD or about 3x for just the software.

 

And lets talk about relative numbers of users.  A good estimate of usage and market penetration would be to look at the forums Mathworks and NI support.

 

Mathworks, 22 members with more than 1k posts 5 over 5k, 3 between 10 and 16kposts

 

A similar shaped curve to NI Forum users But, 140+ users over 1k Posts, 16 over 5k, 5 between 10 and 16k  and 5 more OVER 16k 

 

That being said... They are two different tools.  They are marketed and packaged by two different companies that do not have the same business objectives.  

 

And getting back to the original question: "Re: How do I make a program that doesn't need to be installed?" the answer is "Not with Simulink!"  In fact you will need the Matlab Compiler Runtime installed on the target to run your exe unless you build to run from the .NET CLR, JAVA, have something that can call a C/C++DLL, or Excell And BOAT$ (Bust Out Another Thousand $) for each addon! Nope, no "Stand alone" apps there!


"Should be" isn't "Is" -Jay
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Message 36 of 42
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Jeff, this is getting off track from the original intent of the thread.  Are we going to measure a 'popularity contest' over forum size?  Most forums were inspired by problems and complaints, so maybe that says the other guys are less problematic... so lets not talk about forum size, because it is an unreliable measure of anything.

 

As far as two different markets...  there is market overlap.  And it is a strong, growing move to start buyying companies in related markets, as NI did, from a software product called LabVIEW to hardware markets, such as purchases of IOTech and Measurement Computing, as well as hardware manuyfacture in VXI, PXI, and RIO - unfortunately, most, if not all non-industry standards, such as 6U VME and PC/104 - which would be winners in my area.

 

In addition to market overlap, NI has strong tools in signal processing, same with MATLAB/Simulink - so the two markets are not that dissimilar in all areas.

 

In your last point, I think you will find most corporate installs will include NET framework as part of the install image, very, very few will include LabVIEW.  I don't know any that does, except for NI, and its sub divisions.

 

I am not going to argue the forum point any longer, and always have an ear for technology/software that may be a threat to NI and LabVIEW.

 

 

I use LabVIEW 8.5 for on-the-road, spur of the minute demonstrations from running my executables from a thumb drive without installing a runtime engine, and that is all that matters with me on this area.  The fact is, NI 'took away' the ability to do execute without runtime installed for versions 2009 and above.  Look what happened when Microsoft took away the start button, and touted 'Metro', and look where Windows 10 is going - The reversal done in Windows 10 is the result of strong feedback from their customers., and when companies stop listening to their customers, they get run over by the competition and abandoned from their customers

 

 

 

 

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Message 37 of 42
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Some of your comments make no sense. LabVIEW evolved from a company that only supported its hardware plus instrument control to a more general software language. Not the other way around as you suggest.

As far as the ability to ruin without the runtime, this was taken away in version 5/5.1 and, in my opinion, was a positive step. You have been exploring an unsupported and undocumented loophole that apparently has been closed. Personally, in all of my years, I've never needed to do this and don't miss it.

In any case, you should post to the Idea Exchange instead of here. NI does listen to its customers but sometimes the answer is going to be no, especially for corner cases such as yours.

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Message 38 of 42
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"As far as the ability to ruin without the runtime, this was taken away in version 5/5.1 and, in my opinion, was a positive step. You have been exploring an unsupported and undocumented loophole that apparently has been closed. Personally, in all of my years, I've never needed to do this and don't miss it."

 

Maybe this limitation works fine with you, and my goals, work, and taking LabVIEW applications farther than you may be accustomed to.  I find it a limitation.  Undocumented, maybe, but not unsupported.  It was NI that told me how to run a LabVIEW executable WITHOUT installing the runtime engine.  I cannot get into the circumstances, but I had to run a demo of the software on a computer without the runtime engine installed (original computer was replaced).  A call to NI got me through the demonstration.  You can see for yourself, just follow the following:

 

Do a simple "hello World" application, using LabVIEW 5.1 through LabVIEW 8.6.1, pick any version. 

 

- A simple while loop, with a 20 msec wait timer, and create an EXE with Application builder.

 

- Copy all the files in a folder, from path: "C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 8.5\resource", on a thumb drive.

 

- Copy the new executable into the same folder.

 

- Take thumb drive to a computer without a LabVIEW runtime engine.

 

Run the executable.  Watch it run.

 

 

LabVIEW 5.0.1 was the last version before the runtime engine

 

I have been using LabVIEW from version 3.5, and have every version since.

 

They did say no, since I ran this up the line.  They made this decision, and will stay with this model.  I was satisfied with the ability to run the executable from the folder with all the resource files in it.  Today, the limitation is to use versions earlier than 2009, which NI made it possible and easy to do.  There are no guarantees or support, so you are on your own.

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Message 39 of 42
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It's unlikely to gonna happen. Software in general and system software suites in special have grown far beyond the easy self contained disk image that LabVIEW 5.x and before could exploit. The varieties in OS versions, flavors and colors has simply grown way to big. NI could spend many man years to get that feature supportable again and still having to end up taking shortcuts that will leave certain situations and OS versions in the cold. Man years that cost a lot of money and bring very little return for the bucks.

If you really need this you should consider Mac OS X. There the installation of an application (without system kernel drivers) is to copy a single bundle to the target machine. Microsoft choose long ago to walk down a different path and any application wanting to support more than one specific OS version really has to take care of installing extra dependencies starting at C runtime libraries, to extra Windows component redistributables such as .Net runtimes etc.

Yes there are application developers that go the extra length to create applications that can run from a simple copyable image under Windows but none of them is nearly as complex as LabVIEW
Rolf Kalbermatter
My Blog
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Message 40 of 42
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