We begin building a LabVIEW application by creating a blank
virtual instrument (VI) using, for example, the Blank VI option
on LabVIEW’s Getting Started splash screen. This brings up two
windows: a front panel and a block diagram. The former contains
the user interface of the VI which the user creates using
controls and indicators, each of which is selected from a
palette of options. Code to control the objects in the front
panel is added by the user to the block diagram; this is a
manifestation of LabVIEW’s visual programming paradigm, which
sees an application as being made up of a collection of nodes
that are connected together in a way which reflects the flow of
data between them. Our simple example application is built
around the NAG method g01aa, which calculates the mean, standard
deviation and various other statistical quantities from a set of
ungrouped data (details about the documentation for the NAG
Library for .NET is available here, while the documentation for
the g01aa routine in the NAG Fortran