Results of the CS Workshop 2010

Attendees

Below is a photo of the workshop that was taken by our photographer, Gabriele Otto.

Discussion Notes

LabVIEW Version

Holger Brand chaired a discussion on the choice of the next LabVIEW version for CS. It was decided that we will use LabVIEW 2009. A first (pre-)release is expected in summer 2010.

Classes for CAEN Power Supplies

Christian Droese volunteered to take over these classes from Holger Brand as maintainer starting in spring 2010.

Usage of LVOOP within CS

There is a fundamental difference between the object oriented approachs within CS and LVOOP. LVOOP is based on passive "data objects" that "flow" through wires. CS is based on objects as entities that can be referenced. CS allows multiple inheritance. LVOOP does not. It was tried by Dietrich Beck to use LVOOP just for management of the attribute data. However, this would require quite a few changes in user code as well. Thus, the usage of LVOOP within the core of CS is not considered as an option at the moment. However, since LVOOP is standard LabVIEW, its use is of course allowed by "user classes" for dedicated purposes.

Formal Testing of Code

CS only has coding conventions and a description of a procedure on publishing a package. This includes also things like the usage of the VI-Analyzer. There is no man-power for formal testing. The maintainer of a package is responsible for the quality of a package.

Other

• CSApplicationBaseClasses. Some DIM services will be added to the MCSBase class.
• As a consequence of recent information by the GSI management, non-GPL software (as for example instrument drivers used by CS classes) must not be part of the package of a class.
• People from Jena emphasize, that it would be great, if all CS users would be more active in publishing information on existing classes (SVN-Repository, SourceForge).
• The problem of maintaining software for hardware devices was discussed briefly. As a general rule, the developer/maintainer of software must have the corresponding hardware device available.
• Operating systems. There are presently no active users for Linux. There is no experience with Windows 7. There is no experience with 64 bit architectures.
• It would be nice to have some compress/uncompress utilites in the "Utility.lib" programmed in pure LabVIEW.
• What about saving data in TDMS format?
• Trending should be done with the DSC module and the DSCIntProc class. Holger Brand: Trending data can be accessed by configuring the historical data base as ODBC data source.
• The next workshop will be in early 2011.

-- DietrichBeck - 24 Feb 2010