"Tim Streeter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >I wish, I wish uppon a star for: > >A workspace/project based IDE, that can intergrates not just the vi's >but project management, documentation, source code control etc. >Multiple workspaces can be in memory at the same time with each >workspace can have its own protected memory, so vis and globals with >the same names can have different code in different workspaces.
Hmm, I was already thinking about creating something like this myself but have to admit I'm somewhat reluctant as the size of such a project seems enormous to me. I'm quite afraid that at the time something like this would be usable, NI releases LabVIEW 10.0 with about just what I have done ;-) The only thing you probably won't be able to solve at the moment with existing LabVIEW tools and external components would be the ability to maintain several projects at the same time in memory, every one in their own entirely isolated namespace. I'm not sure at all if that will actually be possible before LabVIEW 12.0 At the moment all one could do is to keep one project at a time loaded in memory, with all the other projects in the list being inactive, but well that wouldn't be so bad. Visual Studio for instance can't deal with operating on several projects at the same time either and that is just a "simple" text programming IDE. One possibility I was thinking at was to use something like Eclipse from IBM to get the user front end of the IDE already mostly canned and ready and try to implement a few plugins to integrate with the LabVIEW development environment. The disadvantage of this would be that you need a rather large installation of additional software with the application itself and the Java environment, but because it is all based on Java it would be possible to support virtually any platform LabVIEW can run on. But a user interface entirely in LabVIEW has also limitations such as quite involved user interface programming. With the new tree control, sub panels and such in LabVIEW 7.0 however it would be at least possible. An IDE like that would not only have to support things like VI and documentation management, Application Building, or Source Code Control with a system like CVS or better maybe SubVersion, but also provide a facility to integrate automatic Unit Testing to be useful for really professional work. >If NI doesn't want to scare away novice programmers, LV could support >multiple IDE 'skins' with a simple wizard based IDE for beginners up to >the professional developer IDE with all the functionality available. They definitiely would have to do this. For a casual LabVIEW beginner the current approach is certainly a lot easier and less intimidating than a full blown project management IDE. In what ways a Wizard like interface could help I'm not really sure. Wizards are in my experience an easy way to create something which is the ideal solution according to the developer of the Wizard, but does often misfit the reality at hand. Rolf Kalbermatter CIT Engineering Nederland BV tel: +31 (070) 415 9190 Treubstraat 7H fax: +31 (070) 415 9191 2288 EG Rijswijk http://www.citengineering.com Netherlands mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
