Features in Silverlight 4 that are useful for the LabVIEW Web UI Builder

Siliverlight 4 has a few features Chris highlighted during the Silverlight 4 launch keynote that I wanted to expand on as well as a few others that he didn’t demo that we’re trying out. We may not make use of all of them in the LabVIEW UI Builder but they do present some interesting possibilities. One features I wanted to write about today is the Out of Browser feature and ability to run trusted applications. The Web UI Builder is browser hosted and we have gotten some requests for is to be able to install the application locally. With the Out of Browser feature people could connect to the server, “install” the application on their machine (including desktop and start menu shortcuts) and be able to develop off-line.

The other feature related to running out of browser is “trusted applications”. One of the nice things with Siliverlight is the security it brings with sandboxing. This does however mean saving files to the hard drive in locations like the My Documents folder isn’t possible. With Siliverlight 3 this means that files are saved to what ends up being some obscure location on the hard-drive that you really can’t control. With Siliverlight 4 by giving permissions to an application like the UI Builder to run as a trusted application you can save to your local drive in your My Documents folder more freely. This let you logically organize any projects you create with the UI Builder and also to zip a directory up and share it with others.

A more recent look at the LabVIEW Web UI Builder

The LabVIEW Web UI Builder was demo-ed yesterday in the Microsoft keynote announcing Silverlight 4. Chris Cifra is one of the architects on the team and presented the UI Builder to a non crowd. You can see the video here. The NI demo starts at 1 hour, 47 minutes.

Join me at the software defined radio conference in D.C. next week

Next week I’ll be attending the software defined radio conference in Washington D.C. For those of you familiar with Virtual Instrumentation you know at NI we’ve been working for many years on software defined instruments that take advantage of PC based technologies. With a simplistic view of SDRs it isn’t difficult to draw a parallel between virtual instrumentation and SDRs. In the case of SDRs some of the communications system components traditionally implemented in hardware are defined in software (on a PC or embedded devices). With some of NI’s measurement class hardware and an IF transceiver you can develop an SDR and use LabVIEW FPGA to program the FPGA on the IF transceiver.

My goal at the conference is to learn more about the needs of people developing SDRs as they might apply to using LabVIEW and LabVIEW FPGA and also NI’s FPGA based hardware. If you’re going to be at the SDR conference next week and would like to get together with ideas on how to apply LabVIEW to SDR development or how to make use of FPGA based COTS solutions from NI for SDRs let me know. You can find me on twitter @kamrans or just e-mail me directly at kamran dot shah at ni dot com

Preview of the Web LabVIEW UI Builder

During this morning’s NI-Week keynote we previewed a new LabVIEW tool to create thin client UIs. By preview, it isn’t avaialble for you to use today. If you make use of web services to share data from LabVIEW applications on Windows or Real-Time (RT) targets (PXI or cRIO) you will be able to make use of the Web LabVIEW UI Builder to create zero install thin client UIs to monitor and update the data with web services. The editor will be accessible through a browser and doesn’t require you to install something on your machine, well except for the Siliverlight plug-in. The editor and your final application are Silverlight applications.

The image below shows you the UI created using the Web LabVIEW UI Builder that was shown today during the keynote as well as editor hosted in a browser.

Screenshot of Web LabVIEW UI Builder from NI-Week 2009 Keynote

The Web LabVIEW UI Builder has the LabVIEW graphical programming paradigm but there are some differences with how you use LabVIEW today. These exist to provide true thin client editing and execution and of course to also for us to try some new things out in a supporting tool without changing your daily existing experience with LabVIEW. I’ll write more on these in blog posts after NI-Week and ask you to chime in on your impressions.

The best way to really get involved in the feedback process is apply for the Web LabVIEW UI Builder pioneer program. If you’re interested please let us know since we’re actively selecting people to join the pioneer program. As part of the pioneer program you’ll get early access to the software when it’s ready and interact with the product manager, program manager and engineers to help shape the product’s features.

Preview of the LabVIEW System Designer and System Diagram

This morning during the NI-Week keynote we previewed the LabVIEW System Designer. The LabVIEW System Designer introduces a System Diagram that lets you graphically design systems that integrate I/O, communication between devices and targets and multi-rate signal processing algorithms.

In communications signal processing, especially on FPGAs, many algorithms are multi-rate and must function in a streaming manner. There are three areas the LabVIEW System Designer focuses on:

1. Multi-rate DSP algorithms on an FPGA targets
2. Communication between multiple computing targets, including Windows hosts, Real-Time Processors and FPGAs
3. Graphical configuration, management and visualization of hardware and I/O resources

Below is a diagram of an HDTV receiver and the image of the System Diagram created with the LabVIEW System Designer from this mornings Keynote. You can see a number of targets, communication of data between them as well as the VIs performing demodulation as well as MPEG decoding.

HDTV Receiver Diagram

LabVIEW System Designer Implementation

I’ll write more on each of the focus areas of the LabVIEW System Designer once NI-Week is over, if a specific area is of more or less interest please let me know so I can focus my future posts better. You can see a video of what we showed last year, I’ll post a link to this years video once it’s ready.

If you think you’d benefit from these features please let us know, we’re actively selecting people to join the pioneer program. As part of the pioneer program you’ll get early access to the software when it’s ready and interact with the product manager, program manager and engineers to help shape the product’s features. This is a critical phase where user feedback can help refocus our efforts in a broad sense or refine some key usability issues.