Random Ramblings on LabVIEW Design

Happy New Year my lovelies.

The other part of my NIDays presentation involved a demonstration of Deploy it started off as just running the shipping demo, but I wanted to show more of its capabilities and for my demo to better reflect a decent software lifecycle. In short I wanted it to look a bit like this.

I also wanted the demo to check for a new version and display an upgrade button if  a new version is available.

In this article I will discuss the process, in the coming articles I will show how I achieved it using Deploy's extensive customization capabilities.

So here's the original version running along nicely and the user decides they need a new banner for the SpiritedAwayDays Conference, they click on the awesome custom bug button and up comes a bug reporting screen.

We use CodeSpaces but any online bug reporting tool could be used. So tap in the details and press send and the work item will be added to the project window.

This screen within CodeSpaces will allow you allocate a person for the task and a milestone/version number for this version of the software.

We make changes to the Changelog in the Deploy configuration and update the software.

We then test the change and deploy the new version.

Deploy allows custom steps to be added and one I use is to commit the changes to subversion with a comment linked to the Changelog. My SVN host sends me an email to confirm it.

The application detects there is a new version available and displays a download button.

When you press the button a download screen is displayed and a new version can be loaded.

And finally we're back up and running again.

So that's the process and there is a video of it in an earlier incarnation (manual SVN entry) available here. If I get time I'll record an up to date version.

The next articles will go under the hood of Deploy, creating custom steps, custom pages and how to link it in the application. The gap I would like to close is the testing side of it, will do this when I get time.

Now I'm going to save the corporate world millions of dollars by creating a generic mission statement that anyone can use...

Be really really good at whatever it is that you do.

Lots of love

Steve