Including older versions of the CVI runtime engine in an installer after upgrading CVI

[tstanley]

Hi,

I have a computer that has CVI 2010SP1 that I recently installed CVI 2012 on.  I noticed now that whenever I create an installer with CVI 2010SP1 that includes the CVI runtime engine, it's now including the CVI 2012 runtime engine.  My guess is that this is because the CVI 2012 installer updated the merge modules in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Merge Modules which it appears that both versions of CVI go to when building their installers.  My first thought is to some how obtain a copy of the CVI 2010SP1 merge modules and manually add those to the installer.  Would that work, or is there an easier way I am missing?  Thanks.

[MilanR]

Hi tstanely,

The CVI Run-Time engine is fully backwards compatible with older versions of CVI so using the CVI 2012 Run-Time engine with an application that was made with CVI 2010 should not cause any problems. In fact up until CVI 2012, it was only possible to have one version of the CVI Run-Time engine installed on a machine at a time, but future versions of CVI will allow for multiple installations of the CVI Run-Time (i.e. one could hypothetically have CVI 2012, CVI 2013, CVI 2014 Run-Times installed at the same time).

Is there a reason you would like to explicitly use the CVI 2010 Run-Time engine instead of allowing the CVI 2012 Run-Time engine?

[tstanley]

Thanks for the reply.  I know that the CVI runtime engine is supposed to be backwards compatible, but sometimes there are some surprises.  What I ran into was this problem:

http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabWindows-CVI/Other-quot-NIDialog-quot-Font-when-running-CVI-2010-programm/...

Now, obviously the solution is to go through and change the fonts in the application, but basically I was tasked to make a one small change to an older program that was already in production and rebuild and now it appears that I can't easily do that...  Moving forward I do applaud the new side-by-side runtime engine feature as that will help with other potential "surprises".

[MilanR · Accepted solution]

Hi tstanley,

Unfortunately for this case as CVI 2010 was made prior to the side-by-side installation feature, it is recommended that if you want to create an application using just the CVI 2010 Run-Time you will have to downgrade the CVI Run-Time installation of the development machine (which has some considerations to be aware of as mentioned in the article) or have a separate machine that can be used for creating the CVI 2010 based distributions.

[tstanley]

A bit inconvienent but I got it to work.  Thanks!

[Danceman]

Hello TStanley,

     So one really nice feature that we have come out with in LabWindows/CVI in 2012 is the Side-by-Side Run Time engines.  This functionality will now be available and more convenient as future versions of LabWindows/CVI become available.
      I am glad you were able to get the issue resolved and I hope you have a wonderful day!

Daniel
Applications Engineering