NI Week 2017

TS 721 – LabVIEW Application Builder and Continuous Integration

Description

Discover the secrets of the LabVIEW Application Builder API and how you can use it to implement your own Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) system. Learn hidden VIs that allow you to customize and automate any part of your build process. Learn how to protect your IP. See an example of a Continuous Delivery system.

Learning Objective

Learn about the VIs and architectures available for you to automate your build process, maintain backward compatibility with LabVIEW, protect your IP and create your own Continuous Delivery system.

Background

For the past ten years, STUDIO BODs has worked on solutions to help LabVIEW developers automate their build process and application deployment. We developed and commercialized BLT for LabVIEW, the most popular and powerful tool available today for Continuous Delivery of LabVIEW applications. This toolkit is available for free on the LabVIEW Tools Network and allows developers to License their application, automate the build process, push application updates remotely, control released versioning, and remotely track usage and errors in a LabVIEW application.

Developing such tools requires a good knowledge of LabVIEW scripting and the LabVIEW Application Builder API, which is very powerful but complex to use, because it is not completely exposed to the developer.

We will share what we have learned about these technologies, and show the VIs to use in order to automate their build process. We will teach developers alternatives to VI's Password Protection in order to protect their IP and illustrate these notions with several examples of build processes:

Automated and advanced build of a LabVIEW application into an executable
Automated compilation of a LabVIEW library into a protected Source Distribution (PPL or LLB)
Automated compilation of a non-hackable LabVIEW library for multiple LabVIEW versions

This presentation will target developers with intermediate and advanced LabVIEW experience who need to automate their build and deployment process. This allows developers to focus on development while having the right tools for continuously building, testing and deploying their applications.

Presenter