Comments on: External Code in LabVIEW, Part1: Historical Overview

By: styrum

styrum — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 19:34:40 +0000

Great article, Rolf! You are THE expert on these matters. Please update this with info about direct pointer manipulation functions from vi.lib\Utility\importsl in LabVIEW 8.5

By: styrum

styrum — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 19:33:38 +0000

Great article, Rolf. You are THE expert on these matters! Please update it with info about direct pointer manipulation functions from the vi.lib\Utility\importsl in LabVIEW 8.5

By: A Rolf Kalbermatter Article - External Code in LabVIEW, Part1: Historical Overview

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 18:42:29 +0000

[...] The first article in the series is External Code in LabVIEW Part1: Historical Overview To avoid [...]

By: Tomi Maila

Tomi Maila — Thu, 10 May 2007 16:02:41 +0000

Nice article Rolf! I really enjoy getting insight into how LabVIEW has evolved into what it is today. There is nothing I can add to your article. Keep them coming

By: Rolf Kalbermatter

Rolf Kalbermatter — Thu, 10 May 2007 06:57:41 +0000

Good point Philippe. I have actually forgotten about that, since I don’t use it. For more trivial files it seems to work quite fine, but the typical header file I often deal with just seems to complicated for that parser and seldom can’t be interfaced to the Call Library Node directly anyhow.
Also I have a bit of a mixed feeling about this tool. While I admire the work of the people who have done this taunting task, I have a feeling that something like this can’t easily be automated. There are so many aspects about interfacing with external code, that a good understanding of the difficulties is necessary in order to create a solution that does not just sometimes work correctly. This is especially true for Industrial Automation systems and I simply don’t trust such a tool enough that I wouldn’t go through every single VI and make at least one thorough extra check that everything is the way it should. But as said the things I usually interface too are either to complicated to be parsed by that tool but mostly simple can’t go into the Call Library Node without extra intermediate translation.

By: Philippe Guerit (PJM_LabVIEW)

Philippe Guerit (PJM_LabVIEW) — Wed, 09 May 2007 16:26:18 +0000

Great article Rolf. This is interesting to have an historical perspective on this.
I think, that there was another improvement in LV 8.2 that could be mentioned. There is now an Import Share Library wizard that can help create code when the header file (.h) for a DLL is accessible. While this is far from fool proof, this has the potential to save the developer of the DLL wrappers a lot of time.

PJM