LabVIEW Idea Exchange

oenk · ‎02-23-2011

How about a "Restart LabVIEW" menu item?

When developing C# add-ons for LabVIEW I sometimes need to restart LabVIEW just to get the current loaded .NET assembly out of the LabVIEW AppDomain. It would be nice if there would be a "Restart LabVIEW" menu item so I don't have to exit and restart manually.

Cheers,

Christian

tst · ‎02-23-2011

OpenG (I think) used to have something like that. It basically called another application which waited and then relaunched LV. I don't see it in VIPM at the moment, which I guess means either they removed it from their repository or I didn't get it from there. You can try asking about it in the OpenG forums. Anyway, while I did use it, it was only very rarely and I didn't even notice it wasn't there until now.

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tst · ‎02-23-2011

It looks like you can find the utility here - http://sourceforge.net/projects/opengtoolkit/files/rsc_restart/1.3/

I'm guessing that it uses an EXE compiled with an old version of LV (probably somewhere between 6.1 and 7.1) and if that's the case, you're going to need to install the appropriate RTE for this to work.

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oenk · ‎02-23-2011

Hi tst

thanks for the info. I will give the OpenG utility a try...

but I still think it wouldn't be so bad having it in the IDE itself

chris.b · ‎02-25-2011

You've got my vote. I think there are a lot of great reasons why this should be integrated into the IDE.

Chris Bolin
LabVIEW Partner Program, CLA

G-Money · ‎02-28-2011

I'm on board. I don't know how many times I've closed LabVIEW with the intention to reopen it immediately but then get distracted. This option built into the IDE would help out in those occasions.

AristosQueue (NI) · ‎03-01-2011

> I'm on board. I don't know how many times I've closed LabVIEW with

> the intention to reopen it immediately but then get distracted. This

> option built into the IDE would help out in those occasions.

Other than the .NET development use case -- which is extremely rare among LV programmers -- why are you doing this?

> I think there are a lot of great reasons why this should be integrated into the IDE.

Please name a second. As far as I'm concerned, if you're having to restart LV all the time, then R&D has a serious bug that we need to fix. I'm really looking for some reassurance here -- I'm a bit panicked if people are truly finding the need to restart LV all the time like this. There's no such option in Excel, VisualStudio, LotusNotes, or any other user app that I can think of.

dthor · ‎03-01-2011

I tend to restart LV to unload VIs from memory, reverting them back to their saved form. It's not a memory-saving issue, it a me-not-remembering-to-revert-the-VI-after-I'm-done-fiddeling-with-it issue.

David_L · ‎03-01-2011

If you install a Toolkit or Add-on or anything else that goes in the Palette, you need to restart in order to reload the palette. That's the use-case I can think this would be helpful for.

tst · ‎03-01-2011

There's already a method which refereshes the palettes. It would be very simple to write a VI which calls that method and place it in the Tools menu (not that I would want another item there). In any case, such cases (for me, at least) are rare and wouldn't justify such an item.

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AristosQueue (NI) · ‎03-02-2011

> If you install a Toolkit or Add-on or anything else

If that's the case, why isn't the toolkit's installer restarting LabVIEW? That's what things like Adobe PDF reader or browser plug-ins would do. (Though I agree with tst that calling a VI to reload the palettes would seem just as correct.)