Is LabWindows 2020 the final version that NI will release?

[adcor]

Hello,

On a previous thread there was information suggesting that NI has no further development plans for LabWindows, https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabWindows-CVI/What-is-the-plan-for-Labwindows-CVI-and-Linux-RT/m-p/4243849...

Since if correct this is a pretty big deal (at least for me), I wanted to create a top level post to give NI a chance to confirm or refute this information.  I have been a long time LabWindows user (> 20 years) and sincerely hope this is not the case.  If this really truly is the end of the road, please make this widely known so we may all start planning for next steps (i.e. what development platform to shift over to for future development).

Also, if this is really true, please detail how this will work in terms of support for future driver releases (i.e. DAQMX, Vision Acquisition, etc).  Will LabWindows still be supported via future versions of these packages, or is there an end date after which it will no longer be supported for new versions.

I really hope this is not the case as I find LabWindows to be incredibly useful, but want to know to be sure.

Thanks,

alex

[l.hovs]

Hello Alex, 

To my knowledge there won't be any new versions of LabWindows. The last version was released in Mid-Nov-2020, maybe they will release new patches.\

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Best Regards Lyudvig Hovsepyan ​

[adcor]

Thanks Lyudvig for the update.

Would someone from NI be able to confirm this please so we may know for sure?  Also, please let us know what will be the nature of labwindows support for future driver releases.

Thanks,

alex

[adcor]

Bumping this up as it seems reasonable that we should be able to get an official answer from NI on this...

[rolfk]

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@adcor wrote:

Bumping this up as it seems reasonable that we should be able to get an official answer from NI on this...

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Considering that Lyudvig has a blue user name and that usually indicates that it is an active NI account (although the forum software has been wrong in this in the past sometimes), I have a suspicion that this is probably as official as it can get. Before NI announces that LabWindows is going EOL (which means you can't buy it anymore nor any toolkit or SSP) they likely won't make any official press release about this.

[gdargaud]

I teach CVI training courses, so if the product disappears it's going to impact me big time. What a drag. If only they were to open source it as they give up on it, one can dream, but that never happens with those big corps...   😞

[rolfk]

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@gdargaud wrote:

I teach CVI training courses, so if the product disappears it's going to impact me big time. What a drag. If only they were to open source it as they give up on it, one can dream, but that never happens with those big corps...   😞

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I'm not sure what sort of teaching class that is, but unless you do specifically LabWindows/CVI courses, you may have done it all wrong for some time. The tool in this case should be secondary. C programming is a very good programming skill for sure, but while I very much could understand that other toolchains like Code::Blocks and similar are all a bit obscure and not exactly industry hardened for professional use, the appearance of Visual Studio Code a few years ago, definitely has changed the landscape of C compilers to use for professional type use. And most likely it was also one of several factors for NI to decide to stop with LabWindows/CVI development. NI can't possibly compete with a toolchain developed from Microsoft that is also free to download for anyone not wanting the professional features. Even the free version is very powerful and NI simply can't hope to try to catch up with that.

So I would definitely look into adapting your course to at least offer also Visual Studio Code as a tool used in there and most likely you would switch over to that entirely within a year once you started.

[CVI-User]

Re Visual Studio Code: I'm curious, how good are the libs (eg. analysis) and the UI editor compared to CVI? I'm looking for an alternative.

[rolfk]

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@CVI-User wrote:

Re Visual Studio Code: I'm curious, how good are the libs (eg. analysis) and the UI editor compared to CVI? I'm looking for an alternative.

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It depends what your expectations are. If you expect out of the box availability and/or can't program without the function panel online help, then you may feel very bad about Visual Studio Code. If you can live without function panels and don't mind using the package management around NuGet to find what you might need (or also what you didn't even know you may ever need), the sky is pretty much the limit. 

[gdargaud]

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I'm not sure what sort of teaching class that is, but unless you do specifically LabWindows/CVI courses, [...]  NI can't possibly compete with a toolchain developed from Microsoft [...]

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Well, CVI is not _just_ a C compiler.

You have the user interface, can you edit a UIR file and generate C code in Code::Blocks ?

You have all the many CVI libraries, maybe you can compile them (for instance the advanced analysis library), but can you open a function panel and generate code from there, auto-declare variables, insert UIR const names, etc ?

Can you use the niDAQmx wizard to generate tasks in C in Code::Blocks ? You can probably shoehorn most of the libs (niDAQmx, VISA, etc) to link with other compilers, but you lose all the integration and probably create dependency nightmares.

Having a compiler and toolchain is one thing but CVI is much more than that. Do some of you develop 'in CVI' without the CVI IDE ?