Meeting Thursday, June 20, 2019: Topic: VI Macros (VIMs)

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

[Edit: Added videos from the meeting, thanks to Chris Stryker for editing the videos]

Meeting Logistics

• Location: Mopac C, Room 1S13 @ NI headquarters 11500 North MoPac Expressway, Austin TX
• Date: Thursday, June 20th, 2019
• Time: 6:00 PM Central Time
• Duration: ~2 hours
• Format: Presentations and discussion
• Food: An accurate headcount helps here so please register if you are attending in-person. Please register here. Even NI employees can use the online registration, there is no longer a need for a separate NI only email. If you are attending remotely, there is no need to register, just join us using the Remote Attendance coordinates below.

Meeting Topics

Using VIMs to enable simpler and more flexible reference libraries

Presenter: Craig Hitchman

Malleable VIs (VIMs) are a feature in LabVIEW 2017+ that allow more dynamic compile-time type propagation. When building reference libraries this behavior can be used to reduce the number of VIs you have to create and make the interface more powerful. This presentation looks at how Craig utilized VIMs to solve pin-abstraction programming challenges in NI Semiconductor Test Systems (STS), and all the different considerations that came into play. Details include making the proper decisions about reentrancy settings within the reference library to reduce compiled code complexity (don’t inline everything!) to balance edit-time performance with runtime performance.

Getting there from here

Presenter: Aaron Gelfand

You have a customer requesting a solution, where do you start? How do you plan an architecture? Take a walk through the customer request, follow-up investigation and architecture design for a quick turn project (customer asked me to drop what I was already doing and give a proposal in 5 minutes and a finished project in no more than two weeks). 

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[Jacobson-ni]

Is Craig going the full 2 hours or is the second hour open right now?

[Aaron_G]

Am I no longer presenting?

[Craig_]

I'm only presenting for the first section, the second slot is open. Aaron, what is the title and abstract for your topic? I expect you can have the slot, assuming Fabiola is alright with it 🙂

[Aaron_G]

Title: Getting there from here

Summary: You have a customer requesting a solution, where do you start? How do you plan an architecture? Take a walk through the customer request, follow-up investigation and architecture design for a quick turn project (customer asked me to drop what I was already doing and give a proposal in 5 minutes and a finished project in no more than two weeks). 

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

original post updated!

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

It has been brought to my attention and Craig's attention that the title should be "Malleable VIs", the term VI Macros only lives in the .vim extension. VI Macros is what Jeff K called them, but once they were released, the feature was named Malleable VIs.

There is one more trivia question for the Challenge the Champions contest at NIWeek 😉

See you on Thursday,

Fab

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

---

@FabiolaDelaCueva wrote:

It has been brought to my attention and Craig's attention that the title should be "Malleable VIs", the term VI Macros only lives in the .vim extension. VI Macros is what Jeff K called them, but once they were released, the feature was named Malleable VIs.

There is one more trivia question for the Challenge the Champions contest at NIWeek 😉

See you on Thursday,

Fab

---

Thanks to David Corney for bringing the name issues to our attention.