Many of you probably know long-time LabVIEW developer extraordinaire and NI Systems Engineering Manager Christian Loew. And you should -- he's been writing applications in LabVIEW for almost 19 years!
About 6 years ago, Christian’s Systems Engineering group at NI started focusing heavily on creating reference designs, components and code libraries they wanted to share with customers. Their goal was to take code created for individual customers – basically proofs of concepts – and turn those VIs into more general libraries they could share online with other customers.
In the process, they encountered all the normal roadblocks and pain points of LabVIEW code distribution. They found it too clumsy to use Windows installers together with the LabVIEW Application Builder. Worse, this method caused problems with dependencies and versioning, and it required too much documentation. The other common VI distribution method, distributing VIs in ZIP files, created too much of a manual and error-prone installation process for customers.
JKI’s VI Package Manager software avoids all of these problems. When VIPM Community Edition added the ability to build packages for free, the Systems Engineering group quickly adopted it and began using it to build their own LabVIEW reuse libraries as well as libraries and reference designs for NI customers. And now that VIPM powers the LabVIEW Tools Network and is recognized by NI as a preferred method to distribute LabVIEW add-ons, it's an even more convenient solution for the NI Systems Engineering group... one they can easily recommend to their customers.
Download the case study today and learn how VIPM helped NI Systems Engineering…
- Support better engineering processes by reusing code
- Improve collaboration among global teams
- Reduce opportunity for VI installation errors
- Save time in creating and distributing reusable LabVIEW code
- Motivate the team to produce better code (because they know others will see it!)
Has your team had good experiences with VI Packages? Or bad ones? Leave a comment to help guide others…
