Hi everyone,

Hope your all having a good day. Some of you may remember we had a quick discussion regarding scripting at a previous User Group session, we've also had a couple of email requests regarding having a session on scripting.

Scipting has now been released as a tool you can use, although it is not supported through the standard NI support channels (you can go online and ask the R&D engineers questions directly, but you cannot ring the NIUK technical support engineers and ask them questions).

We will have some information on how and why you might use scripting available in time for the next user group. Would there be any interest in having an overview session to give you some ideas?

Let me know and we'll make some decisions based on feedback. Remember that we want to give you information that you will find useful, and are keen for everyone to get involved. If you've had some experience with this area and would like to talk for a few minutes, let me know and we can arrange something for the benefit of the group.

Many thanks,

Peter Horn
District Sales Manager
National Instruments UK & Ireland peter.horn@ni.com
07876 234494

Hi Peter,

The recent release of Scripting to the public is quite an exciting step - but it's a bit of a Pandora's box.

I would most certainly like to hear some more from NI on this, with perhaps some useful examples of how Scripting could help us, and also on how Scripting can't help us (where we originally thought it might!)

Regards,

Richard
PTP

Hi Richard,

Thanks for the post, I personally agree that scripting has the potential to open up a lot of new opportunities and applications that LabVIEW can be used for, that it was previously not suitable for, and also that it could potentially cause users a lot of pain if used when not needed.

We have several cases of both NI and customers using scripting to increase productivity and functionality. One of my favourite ones so far is the additions to the Quick Drop tool in LabVIEW 2009. Once you are in Quick Drop you can now automatically create controls, indicators and constants for all inputs and outputs of a selected portion of your code, as well as delete large portions of code and move labels around. Take a look on Darren Natingers blog regarding this. I've given the link below.
http://labviewartisan.blogspot.com/2009/08/write-your-own-quick-drop-keyboard.html

Another implementation of Scripting has been done by Steve Watts from SSDC (another UK Alliance Member and Author of the book "A Software Engineering Approach to LabVIEW". Steve has written an application which allows him to quickly build up a library of vi's which conform to his design rules set out in the book. He has released this as a user solution on ni.com. Again, I've given the link below.
http://sine.ni.com/cs/app/doc/p/id/cs-12151

I also have access to a few video's of some other cool use's of scripting, I've given a couple more links below.
http://pasquarette.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/scripting-get-inside-the-guts-of-labview-at-niweek-2009/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IUGQ0GH1QE

If there is a lot of interest in scripting, I would be happy to ask Steve to come up and speak at a future user group, as he has probably had more experience with it than most of the NI employees in the UK.

We can discuss this on the 9th September, and maybe set something up for next time, but if anyone has any questions, please let me know.

Best regards,

Peter Horn
District Sales Manager
National Instruments UK and Ireland
07876 234494 peter.horn@ni.com