National Instruments Introduces LabView 5.0

During the past 11 years, National Instruments' LabView graphical programming environment has enabled scientists and engineers to design, develop, and modify instrumentation systems rapidly. As LabView evolved, it continued to exploit the latest in personal computer hardware. Now its latest implementation, LabView 5.0, brings a new software dimension to graphical lab programming.

LabView 5.0 offers powerful modern programming technologies in an easy-to-use format. The most innovative of these:

Multithreading For improved performance and reliability without the complicated programming typically required

Instrument wizards To simplify the configuration of GPIB, VXI, serial, and computer-based instruments and automatically generate example programs that leverage instrument driver technologies

ActiveX Container To embed reusable objects directly into LabView and control them with simple graphical programming

Automation Servers For easily calling LabView programs directly from other programming languages and automation clients, such as Visual Basic, Visual C/C++, LabWindows/CVI, standard C languages, Microsoft Excel, and LabView itself

Distributed Computing Tools Create a multilingual user interface, simplifying the translation of the software

Documentation Tools Automatically generate complete program documentation in HTML and RTF formats for immediate use in Online Help and web documentation.

Graphical Differencing Tools Aid in large application development by providing the ability to compare graphical code to determine the differences between them

Programming Menu Bars User interfaces that leverage standard operating system technologies

Undo For simplifying application development.

Some of these features represent incremental improvements in previous versions' capabilities, but some are quite exciting.

Multithreading
To address the requirement of high-performance, reliable applications on PC platforms, modern operating systems such as Windows NT and Sun Solaris are multithreaded. Such applications have numerous benefits, including more efficient CPU use, greater reliability, better response from the user interface, and the ability to use multiple processors.

In fact very few available applications today are multithreaded, simply because multithreading is difficult to implement. Because LabView 5.0, as a dataflow programming language, is inherently parallel, users can easily create code in LabView which they can execute as separate threads. LabView's graphical programming environment is simple, allowing programmers to develop a routine in hours that would take days or weeks to write in sequential, line-by-line programming code.

Instrument Wizard
LabView 5.0's Instrument Wizard adds many new features to LabView 4.1's Data Acquisition Wizards, including the addition of these tools to the MacIntosh OS platform and inclusion of analog output, digital I/O, and counter/timer capabilities. The Instrument Wizard identification, installation, and testing of equipment with no programming. "What's amazing about the Wizard," said National Instruments spokeswoman Rebecca Geir, "is that while they're waiting for a scope, meter, waveform analyzer, or any instrument to be delivered -- before they even have it in place -- engineers can simulate its addition and performance. Then, when the equipment arrives all they have to do is plug it in."

LabView's Instrument Wizard facilitates hardware addition

ActiveX Container
As more and more individuals work together throughout an organization, it becomes increasingly important to share code across programming environments. Reusable components are objects of code that are written in one language but can be called from other environments. ActiveX control is the most common type of reusable component used today, and LabView 5.0 features it. This means that users can easily drop any ActiveX control or document onto the LabView front panel, edit it, and control it programmatically using a simple graphical approach. Conversely, LabView can be incorporated into any other ActiveX programs. Examples of components that could be dropped into or swapped with LabView: web browsers, calendar control, or any of more than a thousand other controls and documents.

ActiveX controls make interoperability simple.

For more information contact: Rebecca Geir, National Instruments Corp., 6504 Bridge Point Parkway, Austin, TX 78730. Phone: 512-794-0100.

by Angelo DePalma