large application development Toolkit and Windows 7 64-bit - unhandled exception

[AndyWatt]

Fairly simple - I wanted to "install" TypeDifer.exe as the diff tool for ".seq" files in the P4V perforce visual client so I could browse and review differences before checkins, etc.

I installed the toolkit from https://lumen.ni.com/nicif/us/nilabstypdiftst/content.xhtml - first by double-clicking, then by installing as administrator with XP SP3 compatability selected. The package installed fine in both cases, but none of the toolkit tools will run.

I've got VS2003, 2005, 2010 installed on this PC, and when I attempt to run TypeDiffer.exe, I get the JIT debugger breaking in with

An unhandled exception ('System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException') occurred in TypeDiffer.exe [71276].

The other tools all give much the same results. Have I missed something? There's a couple of DLLs in with the EXE, do they need to be placed somewhere else to ensure they're seen, or perhaps they need to be registered and aren't by the installer under Win7 64?

Grateful for any input.

[dug9000 · Accepted solution]

We will look into this. One thing I'd like to mention though, is that if you are looking for a general purpose differ and are using TestStand 2010 or higher, you should probably use the differ than ships with TestStand instead under:

C:\Program Files (x86)\National Instruments\Shared\TestStand\FileDifferLauncher.exe

The typediffer is only for diffing types so it will not show you any non-type differences in the file. Also the 2010 differ can diff type differences if you change the options to not automatically resolve type conflicts. Really the only thing the differ that ships with TestStand 2010 can't do that you might or might not want is that it can't merge type changes (It can however merge non-type changes and you can use it as a merge tool for such purposes with perforce).

Hope this helps,

-Doug

[Manooch_H]

You are trying to install a very old version of the installer and files. This is the up to date location for the TestStand Toolkit for Large Application Development.

https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-4070

Please uninstall the version you installed and try the one linked above. Hope this helps.

[AndyWatt]

Many thanks for this response: The system I'm using is locked to TestStand 4.1 (it's "Test n Ready" from ServiceForce) so I can't really use 2010: ideally what I need is a diff engine for SEQ files which can work outside a teststand engine environment, so we can perform (as a minimum) diff operations in perforce - not too worried about merging, we're using an exclusive checkout model as we're working with binary format in the repository to keep filesize down.

I actually found out what the answer was this morning: when I installed an eval TestStand 4.1 engine, the app dev toolkit sprang into life: the unhandled exception is actually thrown when the tools don't find a teststand engine installed! You might want to try handling that error with a dialog reminding the user that they need teststand installed (which I had hoped wasn't the case).

For now, I've got the TS4.1 FileDiffer doing the job, installed as the diff tool for SEQ files in perforce.

[AndyWatt]

Many thanks for the updated toolkit URL Manooch - I'll check this out.