The installer for the LabVIEW 6.0 Run-Time Engine is approximately 11.2 MB on disk. The installer for the LabVIEW 5.1 Run-Time Engine is approximately 2.9 MB on disk. The difference in size is attributed to several things:
The LabVIEW 6.0 Run-Time Engine installer is a Windows Installer (or MSI) installer. As such, it comes with a redistribution of the MSI engine. This engine is about 3 MB on disk.
The core LabVIEW Run-Time Engine is larger in LabVIEW 6.0 than in LabVIEW 5.1 because of new features in LabVIEW 6i such as the new 3D controls.
The LabVIEW 6.0 Run-Time Engine installer includes the DataSocket, NI-Reports, and 3D Graph components. This was done for specific technical reasons as we begin to use the Windows Installer technology for all of ou
r software components.
In the future, we hope to provide an improved installation building mechanism in the LabVIEW Professional Development System that will allow you to include in your installer the exact components you need to run your LabVIEW applications on a target system. These components can include items like the LabVIEW Run-Time Engine as well as driver software for National Instruments hardware products.
If you wish to have a minimal size exe it is sometimes possible to include all of the files in the C:\Program Files\National Instruments\shared\LabVIEW Run-Time\6.0 folder in the same directory as your executable and achieve the results you are looking for. This is still approximately 6 MB and not the supported manner for distributing the run time engine with your executable.
Marc Monroe
National Instruments