The millionth package deserves a party, even in the middle of workday.

Inside the Numbers

On one hand, this was a long time coming, but on the other hand we’ve gotten here pretty quickly. We started counting in 2007, and this graph shows the total VI Packages downloaded since then.

We started off modestly; only about 100,000 packages were served the first year. After that, though, the curve starts to bend. If you divide the graph into two halves, it took about 40 months to serve the first 500,000 packages and only about 20 months to serve the next 500,000.

This acceleration is also reflected in the month-by-month package download rate:

There are some bumps in the data, but the monthly package download rate has been increasing linearly ever since we started tracking it and VIPM currently serves up around 30,000 packages per month.

So What Does This Mean?

This means a lot of things. Obviously, we’re proud of VIPM’s success and we hope we’re making it easier for people to create, share, and sell LabVIEW add-ons. The data, I think, implies we’re making progress there.

But more than that, it shows that the LabVIEW community and “LabVIEW Ecosystem” remain healthy, vibrant, and not just growing but accelerating. We wouldn’t have these numbers without the strong community leadership we see from OpenG, LAVA, and NI Community members.

Our data, then, doesn’t just reflect the growth of VIPM, it reflects the growth of the LabVIEW platform itself. Every day, more and more people are doing better software engineering and solving harder problems in LabVIEW. We’re proud to be a part of that, and we hope you’ll celebrate with us.

If you’re not already using VI Package Manager, why not start today? You can get the free version of VIPM by clicking Find LabVIEW Add-ons… in the LabVIEW 2011 Getting Started window or download VIPM directly from jki.net.

So Which VI Package Was #1,000,000?

Appropriately enough, the millionth package was the OpenG Toolkit (if you have VIPM, click that link to install the package). Congratulations to Jonathon Green and the whole OpenG team. Keep up the great work!

Join the discussion in the comments! Do you have an idea for an awesome LabVIEW add-on? How long do you think it will take VIPM to get to 2 million packages? Tell us below.

If you flip to page 26 of that issue, you’ll find an article by Omar Mussa and myself, entitled Clever Debugging Techniques for Every LabVIEW Developer. We surveyed our colleagues at JKI and our friends in the LabVIEW ecosystem to learn some of the clever tricks professional LabVIEW developers use to save time, eliminate bugs, and build better software for their customers.

Special thanks to Delacor, Enable Training and Consulting, and SAPHIR for their help with the tips. We’re happy to be able to share our knowledge, and we also learned a few things ourselves!

While you’re at it, don’t miss the the celebration of 10 amazing years of LAVA and the shout-out to VI Package Manager, also in this issue.

Are you a LabVIEW bug exterminator? What “secret” tips and tricks do you use to identify, isolate, and squash bugs in your code? Share them in the comments.

If you’re in the Bay Area, don’t miss next Wednesday’s Bay Area LabVIEW User Group meeting!

The Time: Tuesday, February 7th, 2012  5:45 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
The Place: The Lookout at 605 Macara, Sunnyvale, CA 94085
To Register: Sign up here.

JKI Project Engineer Joe Lee will give a talk called, “Closing the Loop: Generating LabVIEW Data Structures from XML.” He will be discussing how (and why) to use XML with LabVIEW for web application interfacing, configuration management, and flexible data storage. You will learn how to take XML data and start manipulating it right away using EasyXML, and if there’s time Joe will show off a new, unreleased EasyXML feature that analyzes XML code and generates the corresponding LabVIEW cluster automatically.

Joe will be joined at this meeting by NI Field Engineer Logan Herr, and Dmitry Sagatelyan from Arktur Technologies, who will each be sharing presentations on LabVIEW Design Patterns.

So come for the LabVIEW and stay for the food, drinks, and community! We hope to see you there.

JKI is pleased to announce the release of VI Package Manager (VIPM) 2011.0.1. This release fixes a number of outstanding issues reported by VIPM users and community members. All users should upgrade.

If you’re already a VIPM user, you’ll be prompted to install this update the next time you launch VIPM. If you don’t have VIPM 2011 yet, get it here for free.

New Fixes in VIPM 2011.0.1

A few of the notable fixes in VIPM 2011.0.1 are listed below. Click here for the full release notes.

• Fixed an issue that made some LabVIEW Tools Network views unusable under certain Windows XP themes.
• Fixed cosmetic issues with Windows “Large Font” settings.
• Fixed an issue that broke previously-working package builds if they included hyphens and periods in their names.
• Fixed multiple causes of crashes on VIPM startup.
• Improved error message when the user tries to install a set of mutually conflicting packages.

Do you have an idea for how to improve VIPM? Is there some way VIPM can make you better at your job? Visit the VIPM Idea Exchange, where VIPM users can interact directly with each other and the VIPM development team and let us know!

JKI is pleased to announce the release of the TortoiseSVN (TSVN) Tool for LabVIEW v2.2.0. All users are recommended to upgrade. See below for detailed changes.

This upgrade is free for all paid users of TSVN Tool for LabVIEW v2.0 and above. If you are a paying customer of the TortoiseSVN Tool for LabVIEW, please contact JKI support to get your updated package or check your email for upgrade instructions.

If you are a new or demo user of the TortoiseSVN Tool for LabVIEW, click here to install it using VI Package Manager 2011. Don’t have VIPM 2011? Get it here.

New and Changed Features

• Added support for Windows 64-bit.

Resolved Issues

• Fixed incompatibility with TortoiseSVN 1.7.

Learn more about the TortoiseSVN Tool for LabVIEW.

JKI's newest CLA, Jack Dunaway

I am very proud to announce that Jack Dunaway just achieved the highest level of NI LabVIEW certification by passing the Certified LabVIEW Architect exam.

I am even prouder of Jack for doing this only 5 months after joining the JKI team and right before NIWeek, which is one of the busiest times of the year at JKI (when we’re preparing for presentations, social activities, and product releases). Jack, too, was busy preparing for his NIWeek presentation on LabVIEW Community Involvement not to mention wrapping up customer projects.

Jack, you’re a great example of the high-caliber LabVIEW talent at JKI, and I am very proud to have you on the JKI team!  I’m a strong believer that LabVIEW Certification matters and your achievement of the CLA makes a big difference to both JKI and our customers, and (by adding one more expert LabVIEW developer to the world) helps increase the general perception of LabVIEW as a highly capable platform for solving the important challenges of our time.

Thanks for making us proud!

Jim Kring
Founder and CEO, JKI

“We have high confidence in the quality JKI produces. The code they deliver works – they’ve clearly tested it thoroughly. And when JKI makes a promise about a timeline, we know we can trust it.” - Gary Palmer, Staff Electrical Engineer, Proteus Biomedical, Inc.

How cool would it be if your medication system could report your body’s vital signs as well as your dosage history? Gary Palmer and his team at Proteus Biomedical are developing just such a system called Raisin™.

Raisin combines an intelligent pharmaceutical (a pill with a sensor) with a wearable monitor. Tiny, digestible sensors made from food ingredients and bonded to a patient’s pills, then activated by stomach fluids after the patient swallows the pill. The patient also wears a small bandage-style patch on his or her skin to detect the ultra-low-power, private, digital signal emitted by the sensor.

This system can provide extremely useful data for healthcare providers and patients:

• The Raisin patch personal monitor records information such as type of drug, dose, and place of manufacture; captures date and time; and also measures and reports physiologic parameters such as heart rate and activity.
• Healthcare professionals can also derive metrics like sleep patterns and respiration rate from the collected data.
• The patch communicates with the patient’s phone using Bluetooth, and the phone makes the data available to patients via user-friendly customized displays on mobile phones, tablets and desktop computers. Patients can choose who else can see their data, including family members or doctors.

Read the case study to see how Proteus and JKI created a collection of LabVIEW-based component and system testing tools to manage system verification and production testing for the Proteus Intelligent Medicine system. The result? With this amazing system, patients can better understand and manage their health. And doctors can provide better care because they have better information.

Note: The Raisin™ system is an Investigational Device limited by Federal (or United States) law to investigational use.  The Raisin™ system is not for sale and is available for use only under Investigational Review Board (IRB) approved clinical studies. 

Smart pill with tiny digestible sensor

Proteus "smart pills," wearable electronic recorder patch, and phone-based monitor

Here’s the problem: unit testing can seem tedious. Prohibitively expensive. Tough to justify. Even intimidating! As a result, applications and application components can easily get starved of any form of automated testing.

A colleague let me in on a secret that helps break down these misconceptions. It’s simple, and maybe even obvious, but it’s still a secret worth sharing: a unit is as big as you want it to be. It’s just that once the unit gets big enough, we call it something else: a functional test, or an integration test. This type of testing can be a great strategy if you’re looking to minimize time writing tests yet ensure many high-level functional units are working as expected.

Here’s an example of how I recently used JKI’s VI Tester to develop an integration test for a LabVIEW application I was working on, and turned some low-value “throw-away” code into a permanent, reusable part of my application’s build process.

I received a new requirement that would require significant modification to a stable application. In this project, a .NET FileSystemWatcher monitors a directory where a third-party app creates test result files. This new requirement involved monitoring for an additional file extension, which meant I could no longer rely on the simple filter built-in to the FileSystemWatcher. While working on this modification, two things became evident: I was going to need to write some helper code in order to develop the feature, and I would need a test plan that involved more than just kicking the tires after building.

I started to write some throw-away code to enable development of a regular expression to replace the simple built-in filter. During this process, it hit me: toss this code into a VI Tester Test Case, and the helper code would effectively become my test plan. By making this code part of a Test Case and running those tests automatically at build time, the code became a valuable, functional part of my QA process! (By the way, the winning regex turned out to be “^[^\~].*\.(xls|xlsm)$“)

This VI is the Test Case that is run by VI Tester. It ensures that the application is able to properly monitor the test file directory and filter the filenames of interest.

By using two application functions (File System Watcher and File Call Back) as part of the Test Harness, I ensure functionality of the entire application component.

Functional tests like these help quell misconceptions about writing software tests. Testing does not have to be boring – feel free to whip out some application design patterns to create integration tests! Further, testing does not have to be tedious. Consider functional testing of high-level processes if the application does not warrant unit testing each low-level function.

Download a packaged version of this example below and poke around. There are a few more goodies in there, such as the source of the FileSystemWatcher setup, and a design pattern I dub “The Flaky Delegate” where a .NET callback brokers messages back as LabVIEW User Events.

Download the example as a VI Package. (108 KB, requires the free VI Package Manager Community Edition or higher)

Learn more about VI Tester, JKI’s free unit testing framework for LabVIEW.

A view of VI Tester and the project structure of VIs under test.

JKI's EasyXML Toolkit wins LabVIEW Add-on of the Year award in the VI Library category

Live from NIWeek 2011… we’re delighted to announce that NI has selected JKI’s EasyXML Toolkit as a LabVIEW Add-on of the Year in the VI Library category!

The EasyXML Toolkit for LabVIEW is a simple set of VIs that make generating and parsing XML data in LabVIEW as easy as creating a cluster. It’s NI Certified as Gold Compatible with LabVIEW.

Try it! You can download the free trial directly from within LabVIEW 2011.  Just click on the Find LabVIEW Add-ons… link in the Getting Started window to launch the LabVIEW Tools Network. Search for EasyXML, and click the Install button.  VIPM will automatically download and install EasyXML into LabVIEW, and you’ll find it in your palettes immediately.

Also check out how NI uses the EasyXML toolkit to support the FIRST Robotics championships, in which NI Application Engineer Patrick Corcoran notes that “JKI’s EasyXML made XML easy, to the point that we may have gotten spoiled with it.”

Winners of the 2011 LabVIEW Add-on Awards, surrounded by Jeffs (Meisel on the left, Kodosky on the right)

In addition to showing off some cool new stuff in our booth, you’ll also find us presenting various technical sessions. Come soak up the LabVIEW secrets our experts are sharing…

The Business Side of Social: Put the LabVIEW Community to Work for You
Tuesday, August 2^nd – 1-2 PM, Room 10C

Jack Dunaway, LabVIEW Champion, Certified LabVIEW Architect, and top contributor to the LabVIEW Idea Exchange, shares his secrets about how to get a great return on time invested in the LabVIEW Community. He’ll also show you how to equip yourself with online tools that give you the inside scoop on the latest engineering techniques to keep you at the top of your game.

Beyond State Machines: Building Modular Applications in LabVIEW
Tuesday, August 2^nd – 2:15-3:15 PM, Room 14

Nearly every significant LabVIEW application uses multiple loops and several pieces of hardware… and coordinating these moving pieces can create a recipe for unreadable code. Justin Goeres, Certified LabVIEW Architect and JKI Product Marketing Manager, will teach you how to use a template for inter-process communication based on “public” and “private” events that is easy enough for intermediate developers but powerful enough for Certified LabVIEW Architects.

5 Clever Debugging Techniques for Every LabVIEW Developer
Wednesday, August 3^rd – 4:45-5:45 PM, Room 10C

Do you want to be a LabVIEW bug assassin? Do you want to identify, isolate, and fix bugs faster than your coworkers by using clever tricks? Omar Mussa, Certified LabVIEW Architect and Senior JKI Project Engineer, will show you several powerful built-in LabVIEW debugging techniques, ranging from simple tools like Retain Wire Values to the best LabVIEW debugging feature that no one knows about.

Manage Reusable Code and Build Commercial Software with the VI Package Manager
Tuesday, August 2^nd – 10:30-11:30 AM, Room 18C or Thursday, August 3rd – 10:30-11:30 AM, Room 18C — pick your favorite time (both sessions are the same.)

Do you need to package your LabVIEW code in reusable components that are easy to track and share with other users, easily install VIs on multiple computers and versions of LabVIEW, or license your LabVIEW packages to quickly turn your code into a commercial product? NI’s Robert Des Rosier, assisted by VIPM Product Manager and JKI Senior Engineer Michael Aivaliotis, will teach you how to set up the most efficient processes for your team to build and distribute VIs and utilities for free.

Bonus for Special People: Chris Roebuck on Data Driven Test
Monday, August 1^st at 6:00 PM – by invitation only

Finally, if you’re fortunate enough to have received an invitation to NI’s Test Leadership Forum event, please join one of our favourite customers, Chris Roebuck from Astrium Ltd., to learn about Data Driven Test in the space industry!

Overview

Many organizations have invested heavily in test data management systems. Understanding how your test data can be used to improve the business results involves considering both the nature of your company’s business and how the data should be stored and accessed. This session will cover key performance indicators and tools that can help test engineers improve business results across various stages of the product life cycle.

“That’s all great stuff!” you say. “But what about those legendary NIWeek parties for after-hours fun?” No worries, we’ve got you covered there too. Stay tuned for our upcoming blog later this week, JKI’s Unofficial Guide to NIWeek Fun…