TestStand 4 & Windows 7

[steve h]

TestStand (4.0.1) on Windows 7

When launching the TestStand (4.0.1) version selecter I get the error "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\VISUALSTUDIO\8.0\CLR VERSION could not be found in the system registry" code: -17003.

I then click on this and the TestStand version says it has changed correctly. Then I click on 'launch' and get the error message "Sequence Editor path not found".

What is going on, is TestStand compatible with Windows 7? What has microsoft got to do with TestStand 4?

TestStand 2.0 works on Windows 7 via the version selecter.

[AllenP]

4.1 was the first version of TestStand to support Windows 7.

[dug9000]

It's recommended that you use TestStand 4.1 or higher if you are running on Vista and TestStand 4.2.1 or higher if running on Windows 7.

See:

http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/10383#toc1

It might be possible to use earlier versions of TestStand, but you must explicitly run any version earlier than 4.1 as an administrator (and run the version switcher as an administrator) and NI does not support using versions earlier than 4.1 on Vista and earlier than 4.2.1 on Windows 7.

Hope this helps,

-Doug

[steve h]

Understand, but why does TestStand version 2.0 work on Windows 7 using the version selector and version 4.0.1 does not?

[dug9000]

I have a couple of theories, not sure which it is.

1) Perhaps you installed 2.0 and it was working because of this, not because of version switching.

2) Newer versions of TestStand have a manifest in the exes that keeps them from being virtualized (with regards to UAC) by the OS (not sure if 4.0.1 had these or not, but if you are writing your own UI and your UI has a manifest that specifies an access level (all newer versions of Visual Studio add this by default) then your process won't get virtualized), virtualization is the OSes way of maintaining backwards compatibility with older programs. It lets them think they are writing to the registry or protected directories even though they are really writing to virtualized versions of these only seen by that program. It doesn't always work though because sometimes things really need to be done to the real version of something and not the virtualized version.

Either way, running TestStand and Version Switcher as Admin will likely allow older versions to work on the newer OSes (though it's not officially supported). Note that older versions of Visual Studio also recommend being run as admin on Vista and Windows 7. Until Vista came out, it was typical for Windows programs to expect to be run with administrator privileges and be able to write to the program files directory.

For more info on UAC virtualization see:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/patricka/archive/2009/12/14/tales-of-application-compatibility-weirdness-dem...

Hope this helps,

-Doug