CVI 5.5 UIR compatibility using LabWindows 2017

[Jayakumar.Vilvaraj]

Dear All,

I am currently using LabWindows/CVI 2017 to develop software. My customer's lab stations all have the CVI 5.5 runtime environment (RTE) installed. if i build application, it says older version will not compatible (UIR) I would like to use LabWindows 2017 and just tell it to target the older CVI RTE. Is this possible? 

[rolfk]

LabWindows/CVI traditionally always required you to install the CVI runtime version in which the program was developed. I believe they added some feature somewhere around CVI 2017 that allows a compiled program to be executed in a newer runtime version, but still not the other way around. Requiring that kind of backwards compatibility would basically make the addition of new features completely impossible, which I'm sure you wouldn't like either.

So your customer will need to install the CVI 2017 runtime on his system too. That should not be a problem as multiple CVI runtimes can coexist on the same computer. Your programs will load and initialize the modern runtime while their old programs will load and initialize the older runtime.

If what you try to do is rather allow the customer to reuse your UIR files in his CVI 5.5 development version then I'm pretty sure that can't be done. But if they just run your precompiled build executable on their machine it will simply require the CVI 2017 runtime engine to be installed too.

[RobertoBozzolo]

CVI 5.5 is a very old version! Usually being stuck to an old version implies you are running on old OS as well, since I don't think you are able to install RTE5.5 on Win10, setup will probably fail on Win7 too.

I wonder why you haven't got a more serious error (like procedure entry point not found) running CVI2017 executable on CVI5.5 runtime!

In my experience, running an old executable on recent runtime engines is normally safe but the jump from 5.5 to 2017 is huge and implies also a hardware update since 2017 won't install on an old OS.

Could it be the moment to plan some hardware/software update for your customer stations?