NI-USI backwards compatibility?

[tstanley]

Hi,

Say I have some deployed computers with the CVI 2010SP1 runtime engine and NI-USI 1.9 installed.  The development PC has CVI 2010SP1 and NI-USI 1.9 installed, so applications built on the development PC run fine on the deployment PC.  Say I upgrade the development PC to CVI 2012.  Can I still build applications on the development PC that will run on the deployment PCs without upgrading them?  If I understand correctly, the CVI runtime engine shouldn't be a problem if I use CVI 2010SP1 on the development PC to build the application, but I noticed that the CVI 2012 installer installs NI-USI 2.0.  I assume then that CVI 2010SP1 will build against NI-USI 2.0 which means that the deployment PCs will have to be upgraded from NI-USI 1.9 to NI-USI 2.0, correct?  Thanks.

[LuisG]

The version of NI-USI in your development system will not affect your deployment requirements. As long as you build your app with CVI 2010 SP1, your app will only depend on the 2010 versions of your NI software, even if you have newer versions installed.

Luis

[tstanley]

Thanks for the response.  The reason I'm concerned though is if I got to the distribution editor in CVI 2010SP1 on a system that does have CVI 2012 installed, it shows NI-USI 2.0 as the version in the "Drivers and Components" tab.  I realize that 2.0 will be backwards compatible with software built against NI-USI 1.9 but it is a bit confusing as this implies that version 2.0 is needed.

[LuisG · Accepted solution]

The reason the Drivers and Components tab shows NI-USI 2.0 is not because 2.0 is a requirement for your app. It's because, unlike the CVI ADE, NI-USI does not install side-by-side. Therefore, the only version of NI-USI that is present in your development computer is 2.0, and so it's the only one that is available for deployment. But if you already have a target computer set up with 1.9, your app should work fine in that computer.

Luis

[tstanley]

Hi LiusG,

Got it.  Thanks for clearing that up.