I hope LabVIEW wishes to become the next-generation all-purpose programming language that will be used all over the world in all industries.
.NET and Java are the dominant Technologies in almost the entire world. With the introduction of the ability to create a .NET Interop Assembly with LabVIEW 2009, I was very excited because I thought that now I could go back to several former employers and make a convincing argument for them to use LabVIEW.... But then I realized, yes, I can now expose my code written in LabVIEW to .NET applications, but my code cannot do many things which are standard in those worlds. For example:
I can create a .NET Assembly, but I cannot:
- inherit .NET classes
- use generic .NET classes
- create.NET classes that use generics
- implement .NET interfaces
- expose a LabVIEW event to a .NET caller
- expose a LabVIEW class to a .NET caller
- cannot create Office Plugins, or any other Plugin that requires me to implement an interface
i.e. almost every single financial institution has an in-house developer that creates various Excel Plug-Ins and Add-Ins, LabVIEW cannot be used to create such a product because LabVIEW cannot inherit from and implement the IDispatcher interface.
The CLI - Common Language Infrastructure is an open specification developed by Microsoft tha
It allows anybody to create a programming language that creates fully compliant .NET code. There are 3rd parties that have created products such as ActivePerl and ActivePython, which allow developers to use Perl and Python (and even COBOL!) to create .NET compliant code. My vision is for LabVIEW to do the same, so that now every single organization in the world that uses any .NET language can also consider using LabVIEW, without having to run into many issues along the way. Only with full .NET compliance will random worldwide organizations consider writing a portion of there software in LabVIEW before hopefully moving entire projects onto LabVIEW!
Message Edited by John80 on 09-03-2009 01:49 PM
