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Liebe LVUG-Freunde dies ist die Email, die mir "der Vater" LabVIEWs, Jeff Kodosky vor etwas mehr als einem Jahr anlässlich der Gründung unserer Usergroup geschickt hat. Seit Januar ist die Usergroup offiziell ein gemeinnütziger Verein. Ich finde das sollten wir bei der nächsten Mitgliederversammlung gebührend feiern. Herzliche Grüße Herbert Hello Herbert, It is nice to hear from you, especially with such good news about the start of another LabVIEW User Group. We are always very happy to hear about user groups because they are an important part of building the global LabVIEW community, and they provide great opportunities to see and hear about challenges and successes other users have experienced. I have copied Kris Fuller on this reply so he can link your new user group web site into the NI web site. I would recommend that you take advantage of all the resources on zone.ni.com and on ni.com/labviewzone, and don't hesitate to call on Kris for assistance-- he has a lot of experience working with all of our user groups worldwide. Many of our developers on the LabVIEW team also routinely visit user groups to network with users and occasionally to give a preview of some of the technology we're working on. Kris would be a great person to coordinate with when such a visit would be of interest to you. I don't know if you are aware of it already, but a number of advanced user groups are starting to take hold as well. These are by invitation only and typically deal with issues of importance to advanced users. The first one to start was in Silicon Valley: http://hamiltondesign-consulting.com/SOCALAVA.htm but now there are advanced groups in Southern California, Boston, and Toronto. Phillips has also started one. So this may be something you may also want to consider in the future. I am always happy to talk about the future of LabVIEW! It has been my life's work for almost 20 years now and yet the development is larger than ever before and the ideas keep coming faster than we can deliver. For the first 15 or so years, I think we were playing catch-up, trying to implement everything that was implied by version one, and expected by our users. Once we delivered version 5 with multithreading and UNDO (finally!), I think we pretty much caught up with expectations. Since that time, we have been able to devote more effort to innovations that extend the scope of LabVIEW and go beyond the original vision. There are still many areas where we are continuing to improve and enhance LabVIEW, there are many projects underway which address most of the items you listed, but the list of user requests still grows faster than we can implement them. I think this is a positive thing though. It means we have enthusiastic users who are seeing great benefits using LabVIEW and they are helping us figure out additional things we can do to increase the benefits and value of the product. In fact, I'll start to worry if the wish list ever gets shorter! The most exciting thing for me, however, are the new initiatives we have undertaken in the recent past. We always felt that LabVIEW would be well suited to designing real-time systems and once we were able to get a slimmed down version running on a small real-time kernel we were convinced. LabVIEW RT is doing extremely well and has spawned a whole host of efforts addressing a variety of real-time and embedded targets. The model of developing on a powerful desktop host machine and seamlessly (cross-)compiling to, and executing and debugging on a remote embedded target works very well and greatly simplifies the development of these systems. The internal architecture we developed to support this model has been extended to support remote panels and is being further extended to form the basis of a more generally distributed LabVIEW. There are lots of exciting possibilities here. More tools for building distributed applications will be appearing in future versions, and I am sure we will be busy for a long time meeting user expectations. Another initiative you are probably aware of is our LabVIEW for FPGAs. This is a dream coming true for me! We always had the thought that the natural parallelism in LabVIEW's diagramming would make it possible to map to a physical circuit, but until just a few years ago we didn't know how we would do it. We have made some major advances since then and are now ready to release our first "pioneer" product which can already do things with I/O that no other board on the market can. This project continues to be a fertile ground for gaining insights into new ways to deal with all types of I/O and timing, and that will have a dramatic impact on what we can do with future DAQ products. The fact that we can scale from desktop machines, to embedded processors, to handheld PDAs, and now to FPGAs, is still amazing to me. There are many more innovative projects we are working on from UI design, to simulation, to CFM tools for large projects, to more design tools like the state diagram wizard, to usability and productivity enhancements, to multiple new toolkits, and so on. Parts of many of these projects will appear in the very next release while some of the more futuristic projects will take a little longer to stage in. One capability that is already in and being exploited internally is scripting. This is an enabling technology we're using at the core of a number of other projects, and it could be very useful in its own right to knowledgable LabVIEW users. We haven't yet worked out how we can expose it because it is fairly complex and requires some understanding of the internal structure of a VI. This could be an ideal opportunity to work closely with some advanced user groups and figure out how to make scripting available. I wish you the best with your new book and in setting up the user group. And I look forward to seeing you next year. Best regards, Jeff P.S. I visited Nuremberg briefly while I was at the Bayreuth Festival to see the Ring this past summer. It was amusing to hear the guide explain that residents were proud to consider themselves Franconian rather than Bavarian!