topic Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language in BreakPoint

Microsoft Visual Programming Language

williamlweaver — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 17:44:29 GMT

Hi All,

How is Microsoft's new Visual Programming Language not an alpha knock off of LabVIEW?

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb483088.aspx

Does this portend increased preeminence of LabVIEW in the near future or just affirmation that Microsoft is two decades behind the curve?

Best regards,

-Bill =]

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

Gabi1 — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:32:09 GMT

that is very interesting. there is some dataflow nonsense in there.......

....and is clearly not designed for programation, but it seems a very good step forward. LV has a clear advantage tough, being on the market for so long, with so dedicated R&D.
are we on the verge of a new programming era?

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

AnalogKid2DigitalMan — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:56:33 GMT

What's even more interesting is the Services for Lego Mindstorms NXT

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb870568.aspx

I can see it now- Battle of the Bots: "In this corner is LabVIEW powered Jeff, in the other, Microsoft powered Bill"

-AK2DM

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

tbob — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 20:11:53 GMT

Typical Microsoft to steal someone else's ideas. I'll put my money on Labview powered Jeff.

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

Gabi1 — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 22:51:44 GMT

@tbob wrote:
Typical Microsoft to steal someone else's ideas. I'll put my money on Labview powered Jeff.

i already did i have LV installed on my newly formated computers and not Visual Studio

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

williamlweaver — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 01:29:10 GMT

I actually hope that most of the lemmings that follow Microsoft-Powered Bill realize their C#'s and J#'s belong in the Smithsonian next to the historical kiosks memorializing COBAL and FORTRAN...

I know I am preaching to the choir, but when I mention I teach my university students LabVIEW exclusively, they react as if I am very wrong-headed or at the very least naive. I guess the same folks would like me to teach glass-blowing and vacuum tube manufacture as well. sigh...

-Bill =]

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

tst — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 16:18:38 GMT

@Gabi1 wrote:

I remember seeing that several months ago and the one thing I did sort of like about it was the looping structure they used in the bottom part.
It's probably not practical if you want to scope the section of code being looped, but I thought it was nice.

Anyway, was this written by an AE?
Whoever wrote it really can't keep their wires straight*.

* Aplogies in advance to all the AEs who can code straight.

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

PhillipBrooks — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:39:39 GMT

Typical Microsoft solution; instead of computing they talk us to death!

"The number is one"
"The number is two"
...
"All done!"

They forgot "Would you like to apply the Visual Programming TTS Exploit hot-fix patch now? Say OK, Cancel or Retry Now. Remember, the exploit reverses your responses, so please say Cancel to continue..."

Message Edited by Phillip Brooks on 10-22-2007 07:40 AM

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

altenbach — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 14:37:59 GMT

@Gabi1 wrote:

I am curious about race conditions here. What guarantees that the "All Done!" is spoken after, and not before, the last number is pronounced?

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

Ben — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 15:42:23 GMT

Christian asked "What guarantees that the "All Done!" is spoken after, and not before,..."

If we aply LV-noob-think to that question the answer is "The number is ... TexttoSpeech" is above and to the left of the other so it MUST execute first.

Ben

Message Edited by Ben on 10-22-2007 10:43 AM

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

williamlweaver — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 16:08:25 GMT

@Ben wrote:

Christian asked "What guarantees that the "All Done!" is spoken after, and not before,..."

If we aply LV-noob-think to that question the answer is "The number is ... TexttoSpeech" is above and to the left of the other so it MUST execute first.

Ben

Message Edited by Ben on 10-22-2007 10:43 AM

Hey Ben,

Excellent observation... Back in my days in ultrafast lasers and high-speed electronics, the signal propagating along the shorter wire arrived first.

Perhaps MS has designed MS-VLP with near-term arrival of optical computing in mind? ...with homage to Y2K, that is forward thinking at is best...

-Bill =]

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

smercurio_fc — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:11:08 GMT

Very interesting. Don't know how rubust this language would be for large-scale programs, and it seems to be designed for use in robotics programming, rather than general-purpose use. Kind of reminds of HP-VEE more than it does of LabVIEW.

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

Wayne.C — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:23:09 GMT

I would appear that Mr Gates is miffed that the all the kiddies in the schools are programming their LEGO Mindstorm robots with NI software and not MS products.

MS has always been pretty aggressive about getting their products into the schools.

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

williamlweaver — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:55:27 GMT

Actually, I hope NI can follow Microsoft's lead and provide Visio-style spline-fit wires between components.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb483088.aspx

Just imagine how much faster our LV apps will run if we could remove all of those high resistance 90-degree data pipe bends!

-Bill =]

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

Ben — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 18:01:53 GMT

Just imagine how much faster our LV apps will run if we could remove all of those high resistance 90-degree data pipe bends!

5-stars for reading my mind.

Ben

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

parthabe — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 07:20:06 GMT

@centerbolt wrote:

I would appear that Mr Gates is miffed that the all the kiddies in the schools are programming their LEGO Mindstorm robots with NI software and not MS products.

Afterall, their Xbox has been developed [ I imply 'tested' ] using PXI n LV.

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

tst — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:40:28 GMT

It seems that graphical (or partially graphical) languages are becoming very popular now.

A couple of other examples:

Scratch.
Alice.
I saw the beta of Visual Studio 2008 and it has something which is is highly reminiscient of the state chart module - it allows creating a higher level diagram of the code.

I'm sure there are kinds of others around as well.

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

tbob — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:52:46 GMT

A few years ago (about 4), some company came up with a Visual Basic plugin called Softwire that allowed graphical programming in the Visual Studio environment. I played with it a little but never used it. Has anyone else heard of Softwire?

Here is a link to Softwire: http://www.adeptscience.co.uk/products/dataacqu/computerboards/softwire/

Message Edited by tbob on 11-12-2007 02:52 PM

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

tst — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 08:22:13 GMT

tbob wrote:

Has anyone else heard of Softwire?

I never saw it in action, but I definitely heard about. Read this interesting thread from the LAVA forums (and be sure to read all the way to the twist ending).

Re: Microsoft Visual Programming Language

altenbach — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 09:10:42 GMT

tst wrote:
A couple of other examples:

Scratch.

...

I'm sure there are kinds of others around as well.

Curiously, I actually played with scratch a while ago. Interesting UI.

Another one is Peter (http://www.gemtree.com/peter.htm). Looks quite linear, though.

Wikipedia has a big list of visual programming languages and dataflow programming:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflow_programming

It seems graphical programming is very popular with music editing.

Really cool looking code can be done in Piet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet ) 🙂