Sequence Diagrams are essential for designing, understanding, and debugging concurrent systems. Here is a tool to automatically generate them from running code.
I recently read XP Explained. It had a section on page 109 where it talked about simplicity. I often talk about the importance of simplicity. In fact, it’s on my list of fundamental assumptions about coding. In XP Explained, Kent Beck lists 4 criteria to evaluate how simple a
I inherited a project written using Actor Framework recently. I started to do a little refactoring to make it easier to add some of the changes I needed to make, following Kent Beck’s idea of “First make the change easy, then make the easy change.”
What is in a
It’s offical! The DQMH podcast form Chris Farmer at Wired-in Software has been officially released! It’s exciting to have some new listening material about LabVIEW!
It’s been a while since we have had a good LabVIEW Podcast. We used to have VIshots which hasn’t produced anything
In one of his talks, Uncle Bob describes Software Engineering as the art of managing dependencies. This is something that a lot of new programmers have difficulty with. I often run into code written by beginners (and some not-so-beginnners) that has lots of circular dependencies. I also see a lot
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
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
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’
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
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
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
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
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