The SAS Workshops Blog

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Rocket Book

If you are looking for an inexpensive gift this Christmas season, I suggest you check out the Rocket Book.   They have a really cool video on their website that explains it all. Basically, it is a paper notebook.  You take notes on it with a special pen.  Then you use

Software tools , Frameworks , OOP

Events for UI Actor Indicators

Allen Smith and I have been working on a side project we called Events for UI Actor Indicators for a couple months (we’ve both been busy lately).  It started with a discussion at a CLA summit in Austin.  That prompted Allen to come up with an idea and then

Random

Ideal Development Machine

Since it is Black Friday, now would be a great time to go shopping for a new development machine.  There was a post on the CLA Forums about it. Unfortunately you have to be a Certified LabVIEW Architect to view the CLA forum.  So I though I would post my

Software tools

How to use VIPM effectively

My friend Matt Richardson recently suggested I write a post about how I use packages in my workflow, particularly how I use VIPM. This is my response. Matt, hopefully I answered all your questions. What is VIPM? VIPM stands for VI package manager. It is a free tool made by

Software tools

AF Tester Now On GitLab

At the recent CLA Summit, there was a lot of talk about collaboration particularly about open source projects hosted on sites such as GitLab. I’m proud to announce that the AF Tester project that I’ve showcased in some of my recent presentations is now available on GitLab as

Resources

LabVIEW Center of Excellence

I just wanted to take a moment and highlight the LabVIEW Center of Excellence (COE) website. I thought it was pretty well-known, but after the recent CLA summit, I realized not everyone knows about it.  I ran into a fellow CLA there who was telling me about his new job.

Conferences

GDevCon Videos Available

The videos from GDevCon are now available on their YouTube Channel Below is my presentation as promised.  Be sure to check out all the other ones as well.  You can check out my review of GDevCon here.

Conferences

CLA Summit 2018

Friday marked the end of the 2018 CLA summit in Austin. It was 2 and a half days full of presentations and discussions. Kudos to Jon McBee and Jeremy Marquis for running the summit and leading the discussion.  Stephen Loftus-Mercer also helped in the organizing, but he was sick and

Conferences

GDevCon 1 Review

This last week I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the first annual GDevCon in Cambridge. This post is about the presentations I saw and my takeaways.  I apologize for the length, but there was a lot of content crammed into those two days.  In order to do

Coding Philosophy

Proficiency

I always like to challenge myself. Lately I’ve been challenging myself by running ultramarathons.  As you might imagine this requires a bit of training. These training runs give me plenty of time for reflection. The other day as I was on a training run in the mountains, I kept

Conferences

GDevCon is almost here

In case you haven’t GDevCon is taking place September 4th and 5th in Cambridge.  What is GDevCon? It is the 1st ever independent graphical developers conference. Check out the website.  There is a list of speakers there. I think you will be quite impressed. They’ve gathered a lot

Conferences

Videos from NIWeek 2018

As many of you may know I had the privilege of speaking at NI Week this past May.  Nancy Henson helped to organize a Software Engineering, Processes, Architecture, and Design (SEPAD) track.  She enlisted Mark Balla, Jon McBee, and a few others to help video the sessions. There were a

How to , Software tools , Resources

Using Virtual Machines Part 2

This is second of a 2 part series on using Virtual Machines for LabVIEW development.  You can check out part 1 here.  Part 1 discusses why we use virtual machines.  This article will discuss a little more of the how.  I’m not going to give away all my secrets,

How to , Resources , Software tools

Using Virtual Machines Part 1

My friend Peter Davis recently asked if I could do a blog post how we use virtual machines (VMs) for LabVIEW development. Before I go into too much detail, I do want to say that I learned a lot of what I know about VMs from John Giannangeli of Bolder

Book Reviews , How to , SCC

Gitting Started With Git

What do you use for source code control? While I was asking everyone I met at NI Week about what frameworks they were using, I also started asking about source code control as well. Almost everyone I talked to universally said they were using some kind of source code control.

Frameworks

The case for using a standard framework

Why should I use a standard framework instead of my homebrew QSM, producer-consumer, etc architecture? I spent May 21-24 in Austin for NI Week  (see my review here). If you have been following any of my recent posts and presentations, you will know that I have done a lot of

Conferences

NI Week 2018 Recap

NI Week 2018 is now over. I had a really great time. I saw a lot of great presentations and was able to meet and reconnect with lots of great people. We really do have a great community! I posted a quote on Linkedin recently that got a lot of

Book Reviews

Good Introduction to UML

UML Distilled by Martin Fowler Unified Modelling Language (UML) is a standard way of graphically describing and designing software. If you are like a lot of LabVIEW programmers (myself included) and are a physicist, scientist or engineer by training and not a computer scientist, you may not have been exposed

Conferences

One month to NI Week

This year NI week is May 21 through 24. This year I was lucky enough to get a presentation accepted.  I will be presenting at 11:00am on Wednesday in room 15.  Below is the title and abstract. SW Test: Test Strategies for Project Success: From DQMH to AF and

Frameworks , How to , Coding Philosophy

Simple DQMH Do's and Don'ts

Today’s post consists of some simple do’s and don’ts in order to get the most out of using the DQMH.  The DQMH is a great tool, but like any tool, if you misuse it, you can create a mess.  In a previous post, I mentioned Developer Dan

Conferences , Software tools

Actor Tester

Here is the video from my recent presentation in Madrid. Enjoy.   Thanks to Jeffery Habbet for the recording.

Frameworks , Coding Philosophy

Build Your Framework On a Good Foundation

If you have been following any of my presentations at various NI events lately, you’ll know that one of my big focuses lately has been on the development process and frameworks.  I just recently inherited a project from someone, let’s call him Developer Dan. Dan taught me a

Software tools , How to

Finding LabVIEW Version of a File

Since I do consulting, I often end up inheriting code.  Often I get called in because someone had hired a LabVIEW developer to write some code for them and then the LabVIEW developer had disappeared, either retired or moved, or got another job or something similar.  Luckily they usually leave

Frameworks , Webinars

Developer Series Presentation

Recently I was very lucky, in that National Instruments decided to use a presentation I put together for one of their Developer Series presentations.  It’s a series of presentations on best practices for developing code in LabVIEW. Here is the video and below is the chat log. This is

Book Reviews

3 Marketing Books Worth Reading

We are all in Marketing. I know this blog is supposed to be about LabVIEW and automation, but if we’re honest, we are all in marketing. Whether you work for yourself as a consultant or if you work for an Alliance Partner or some large industrial company, you constantly