The SAS Workshops Blog

Continuous Integration , Webinars

August 2019 Webinar

Basic Continuous Integration with GitLab and LabVIEW – 8/28 at 11am MT How do I make sure my unit tests get run regularly? Maybe you have unit tests, vi analyzer tests, and a build process in place but how often do you actually run them? What if one action that

Design Patterns , Unit Testing

Humble Objects

Ego is the Enemy. Ego can cause us all kinds of problems in our personal and professional lives. When it comes to software, it is no different. Objects and VIs that have large egos create problems. One of the problems they cause is that they make it very hard for

Unit Testing

Unit Testing As An Aid For API Development

If you follow Test Driven Development (TDD) the first step is always to write your unit tests before you write your code. Well in LabVIEW that doesn’t work out quite so well because you need to have a subvi to drop into your test case. That means that before

Unit Testing , Coding Philosophy

Unit Testing as Bug Repellant

Nobody likes bugs, whether they are mosquitoes, black flies, spiders, or software bugs. One mosquito bite is generally mildly annoying but tolerable. Similarly with software, if your customers find a bug, it usually results in mild annoyance. Of course, there are exceptions to both: some mosquito bites can be deadly

Unit Testing

Unit Testing as a Delegation Tool

Delegation is hard. There are a variety of reasons, but there are two things I’ve heard quite often from customers, and they are related. They have trouble specifying and clearly communicating the exact requirements to the person they are delegating to. They also have trouble verifying that whatever code

Conferences

See us at CLA Summit 2019

We just received word that our submission at NI Week was accepted. Unit Testing at Mock Speed We will be talking about using some new tools me have developed for creating Mock Objects in LabVIEW for Unit Testing. A mock object is a kind of test double. Just like a

Unit Testing

Unit Testing as Documentation

Comments and documentation often lie. The only truth is the code. Steve Watts commenting on Chris Stryker’s Clean Code presentation at NIWeek 2019 Now I don’t think Steve is accusing the developer who wrote the code or documentation of deliberately lying, but we’ve probably all encountered code

Unit Testing , Coding Philosophy

Unit Testing as a Safety Net

Since I recently finished reading xUnit Test Patterns and my upcoming webinar is on Unit Testing, I have been thinking a lot about it lately. I thought I would expand on some of the ways in which I find unit testing incredibly useful. Most of wouldn’t even think of

How to

Using Maps As A Better Way To Pass Command Line Arguments

So for those who don’t know, LabVIEW 2019 incorporates some new datatypes: Sets and maps. Piotr Kruczkowsk has been posting a bunch of possible use cases on Twitter. You can see them here. Peter has inspired me to come up with one of my own. The problem with CLI

Conferences

NI Week 2019 Recap

I had a great time at NI Week this year. As always it was a bit of a party, although this year I skipped the Spazmatics after party after party on Wednesday night since I had to present early on Thursday. The highlight was definitely hearing Scott Kelly speak on

Webinars

June 2019 Webinar

How do I make sure my code works? If you have ever asked that question then this presentation is for you. Find out how unit testing can help you verify that your code works and help you track down bugs when it doesn’t. We’ll talk about the basics

Book Reviews , Unit Testing

XUnit Test Patterns

If you want to know everything there is to know about xUnit Testing, then xUnit Test Patterns by Gerard Meszaros is the book for you. I must warn you, it is not light reading (it’s almost 900 pages) and it is not geared towards beginners. You should at least

Conferences

NI Week - Why all the hype?

Today is the first day of NI Week 2019. What is NI Week? It’s only the largest gathering of LabVIEW enthusiasts in the world! My friend John jokingly refers to it as something akin to a Star Trek Convention. Granted there is a bit of geekiness going on there,

Interviews

My Origins Story

I recently sat down for an interview with Ram Gurung. We talked a lot about how I got into LabVIEW and the ensuing adventures. I also give a brief overview of my upcoming presentation at NI Week. Ram has a lot of really great LabVIEW videos and tutorials on his

Book Reviews

Book Review - On Intelligence

A year or two ago I was at a dinner at NI Week and I got to sit next to James Loftus. We were discussing artificial intelligence and he said “Oh you have to read this book called On Intelligence”. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is all the rage these

Continuous Integration

The benefits of Continuous Integration

In a previous post, I talked about various ways to earn technical interest. One of those ways was Continuous Integration or CI. I thought I would elaborate a little on the benefits of using CI to automate the boring stuff so you can detect problems early, streamline your process, and

Coding Philosophy , Frameworks

What are you designing for?

My upcoming webinar got me thinking about a recent conversation that I had with Fabiola about design decisions. It also reminded me of a few of Steve’s recent blogposts on Design Priorities and on Project versus API Design. My discussion with Fabiola revolved around the differences between the Actor

Continuous Integration , Unit Testing

Six Easy Ways To Earn Technical Interest

Steve Watts recently made a excellent blogpost about Technical Accounting. If you don’t follow Steve’s blog you definitely should. In this particular article, he coined the terms Technical Debt, Technical Investments, Technical Assets, and Technical Tax. Steve’s talk of Technical Investments, got me thinking about Technical Interest.

Frameworks , Webinars

April 2019 Webinar

Choosing a Framework – April 24th 11am-12pm MST So many choices DQMH, AF, DCAF, SMO, ALOHA, TLB, and I’m probably still missing some.  There are lots of LabVIEW Frameworks out there (and they all have cryptic acronymns).  If you are confused by this alphabet soup of frameworks, then this presentation

Random

Ergonomics 2

The last post I made was about ergonomics as far as keyboards and mice. I had a few other things I wanted to talk about, but the post got rather long so I cut them out. Since that post was so well-received I thought I would add another post about

Random

Ergonomics

There was a post on the LabVIEW forums recently about ergonomics. Someone on there was suffering from a repetitive strain injury in their wrist and was asking about vertical mice. They got a lot of varying advice and recommendations. It inspired me to add my $.02 here about my experience

How to

Update VMs on SSDs

This post is an update to my previous posts on using Virtual Machines (VMs). Here are some links to those articles: * Using Virtual Machines Part 1 * Using Virtual Machines Part 2 In part 2 I included a section on where to store VMs. I mentioned that I was using a

Design Patterns , OOP

A Business Case For Applying Design Patterns

This is my fourth article in a series on the Gang of Four book on Design Patterns. I thought four was an appropriate number of articles. Here are links to the first 3 articles: 1. Design Patterns – A Review 2. OOP Design Patterns in Actor Framework Part 1 3. OOP

Design Patterns , OOP

OOP Design Patterns in Actor Framework Part 2

This is a continuation of my previous post on GOF Design Patterns in the Actor Framework. I found a lot of examples, so I decided to break it into 2 posts. You can access part 1 here and my review of the GOF Book here. Part 1 showed examples found

Design Patterns , Frameworks , OOP

OOP Design Patterns in Actor Framework Part 1

Last week I wrote a review of the GOF Book on OOP Design Patterns. This week I would like to share some examples of these design patterns in action, so you can go look at them and see how they are implemented and used in LabVIEW. When I took Allen’