If it's not blatantly obvious, I value the Actor Framework (AF) as an important part of my toolkit. It's not the right tool for every job, but it is a useful tool for many. One part of the AF I don't love is the necessary tedium of building Actor Core event-handling UIs and then dragging reference controls (for my by-reference updates) into the Class Private Data Cluster. This got me thinking... In general, adding controls to a class feels like a relatively clumsy process, even when not using the AF. I let this mild frustration stew inside my melon for years, and then I finally did something about it.

Typically the first program you write when you are learning a programming language is, "Hello World!".  Due to the popularity of my prior post on optimizing the traveling salesman problem with genetic algorithms I decided to write a general parallelized Genetic Algorithm Framework for LabVIEW, naturally the first thing I taught it to do was to say, "Hello World!".

The Bowling Game Kata is a very well known coding exercise created by Robert C. Martin geared towards practicing Test Driven Development (TDD).  My cohort Russell Blake from G Systems was reading through Robert Martin's fantastic book, "Agile Software Development" where he came across the Bowling Game Kata and had the brilliant idea of recreating it in LabVIEW and blogging about it.  We decided to each go through the kata with a different unit test tool and blog about our experience, I will be going through the kata using the LabVIEW Unit Test Framework Toolkit (UTF), Russell will follow up with a post that goes through the kata with JKI's VI Tester.