How to edit a VI from 6.1 to 2010 so we don't get errors

[kail]

I work at a collge, and we had written many of our VI's prior to 8.2. Is there some way to convert these so they will open without errors in 2010? 

It seems like Labview changed so many things from 7 to 8 which then "broke" all of our VI's. Is there some easy upgrade way to get them working again?

We are so confused about why Labview did this, and have no idea how to correct the errors we get in a new version.

Any help would be immensly appreciated! We are stumped!

[Jacobson-ni]

For others, there is a bit more context in the version conversion thread.

http://forums.ni.com/t5/Version-Conversion/LV6-1-to-LV10-for-a-college/td-p/3311745

There is no magic bullet for upgrading LabVIEW code so there are no errors in the upgraded VI. I wish there was, but there isn't. If there is any error that you don't understand how to fix, you can post the error and the code where this error is coming from and I'm sure people would be able to help out though.

[kail]

You linked the post I just put up on the conversion forum! LOL!

It's just upsetting that you pay a lot for LabView then they break your old software and provide no easy means to upgrade it. We only use Labview every 3 or 4 years, so it is no easy feat to figure out how to upgrade our VI's.

Thanks for your help, Jacobson.

[RavensFan]

Except LabVIEW 6.1 is actually 13! years old.

[billko]

That's like asking for an upgrade path from Windows 95 to Windows 10.

Which is impossible - ironically - for many of the same reasons that you can't upgrade from LV 6.1 to LV 2010!

[rolfk]

Actually, many of my applications I've written in LabVIEW 6,1 and even earlier upgrade fairly easily to newer LabVIEW versions. The only thing where it usually gets into problems are with legacy APIs such as NI-CAN, NI-DAQ and similar. While they still work even in modern LabVIEW, it's not likely that you would want to use them nowadays since a lot of the hardware they support is long considered legacy technology and often not even physically compatible with modern computers (anyone knows ISA, EISA and similare standards?). Are you angry about computer manufacturers changing hardware standards every few years in order to allow for progress too? So you would generally have to adapt at least these parts to the newer APIs which is of course some work and sweating.

My guess is that your old software makes use of several driver APIs that you haven't installed yet. And if your documentation that your LabVIEW application surely does have, doesn't document what extra APIs you need to install into a new LabVIEW installation to allow it to work, then that would be an error from the original developer who "forgot" to document his or her work. 

Quite possibly your software also might make use of some of these legacy APIs and while you can still install them on modern Windows systems (at least if they are 32 bit) and they actually do work, you wouldn't be able to buy much of the hardware these APIs support and even less the computers these hardware boards require to be even able to physically plug them into.

[kail]

Ahhhh.... So the drivers are intermixed in the circuit! I was thinking the drivers were just added after the circuit was built. To me, know almost nothing about Labview, and  used to building physical electronic curcuits, I was assuming that the drivers were added to your circuit *afterwards*.  

I'm hoping I have someone from the boards to help us upgrade our VIs for us. The 84 year old prof who wrote them is confused as to how to upgrade them so we can use them on Win7 64.

Thanks for your explainations everyone!

I haven't seen any documentation on how to do this NiDaqmx upgrade on old VI's. If anyone has seen anything, could you forward it my way? Thanks!

[OEM_Dev]

There's this

http://www.ni.com/tutorial/4342/en/

but like the others have said, chances are you are trying to interface with some hardware that isn't going to be supported anymore anyways