LV 2016 Known Issue 583670. Can I really no longer build for Win7 after I install?

[Matthew_Kelton]

Hoovah,

The issue is not that 2016 dropped support, it's that it broke support in prior versions with no warning.  I understand that dropping support is a necessary evil, but when the fix is hours of uninstalling and reinstalling, a little foresight into raising the alarm before you break everything is not unreasonable to be expected.

It cannot be assumed that all of us have a choice in what PCs are used.  I just had to set up a VM for LabVIEW 7 to modify code.  Once I realized this issue came up, I know I will have to set one up for LabVIEW 2012 soon, as I have a customer that requested an update, and they have to support XP and Win7.

[Hooovahh]

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@WNM wrote:

With this version/update NI has effectively cut off all support for a large class of older hardware. The sad part is that I don't think it was really necessary.  

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While technically not necessary, I'm guessing it saves many thousands of hours of regression testing.  I'm not saying it was a good decision, just that NI has a huge effort of testing every combination of software and hardware on every operating system, and version, with every perminatation they can think of before releasing updates to hardware or software.  And with NI having an ever growing library of software and drivers and I can see why they would want to cut off older OSs.

Every developer should be aware, that their system is somewhat fragile.  Any Windows update may (and has) broke NI software in the past where a build would not be possible, or hardware drivers act crazy.  The fact that updating NI drivers to newer versions also may have an effect on existing projects should not be a surprise.  Any change to your system should be taken knowing that things just might not work anymore for a myriad of reasons that cannot be predicted.  NI clearly should have done more to make it obvious what an update would do to these legacy projects, but I'm not really surprised by the result, I've seen it before.  But none of this really means anything if you just spent 2 weeks rebuilting a test system and working with NI support to change a COM1 to a COM2.

Still I'm quite interested in hearing what a blue avatar has to say about this...

[Intaris]

I'll just mention these Ideas here.

LTS LabVIEW

Parallel Driver installations

Me personally, I work more and more with sandboxed VMs.  It's just more reliable.

[Rich_Y.]

You can make a 2016-built deployment run on XP by following the instructions in this NI KB:

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/1B9012184C24325586257FFD0056FEA1

[RTSLVU]

Am I wrong in guessung that you can still manually install the LV Runtine, VISA, 488.2 and any other support you need and then simply copy the complied LabVIEW program over.

What else does an "installer" actually do?

[Rich_Y.]

Certainly--it's just not as convenient as having a single installer that contains all the necessary software + your LV VIs/EXEs.

[WNM]

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@Rich_Y. wrote:

You can make a 2016-built deployment run on XP by following the instructions in this NI KB:

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/1B9012184C24325586257FFD0056FEA1

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That document talks about making the installer run. But after the installer has done its thing, will the LabVIEW executable run if its execution depends on the August 2016 device drivers which also claim to not support XP?

[Rich_Y.]

The behavior of any NIWeek 2016-released software on XP--once installed via KB workaround--is undetermined.