managing LabVIEW upgrades

[Dave_Thomson]

   I find myself in the position of working in a small company with a couple of LabVIEW developers, each with several development computers and several versions of LabVIEW.  Most of our work is in 8.2, but some projects are in older versions and some in 8.5.  In addition, our main project is deployed as an executable with plug-ins that are distributed as LV source code.  We have numerous customers running this software, and we occasionally send them updates of the plug-ins.

   I recently upgraded one of my development machines to 8.2.1, wanting the obvious benefits of the patch.  Then I found that when editing the plug-ins, they were, of course, recompiled.  If I were to send these VI's to a customer, they would still work in the 8.2 executable, but they would see a brief "compiling" window appear each time the code was loaded.  I am now in the process of uninstalling 8.2.1 and reinstalling 8.2, for this reason.

   I was wondering if other people have dealt with this type of situation and have any advice.

Regards,
   DaveT

[CAS_MattF]

Dave,

Agree, it is difficult to support multiple versions.  In you case you should be able to mass compile the plug-ins assuming they are in LabVIEW.  The additional issue is that the toolsets are not written to install across multiple versions.  For this reason I still use LV 8.2.1 (very stable) for most of my development.  I find I need to invest a day to upgrade my system: installing software, using tricks of copying / uninstall / reinstall to make the toolkits to work across multiple versions, and making sure everything I need is installed.  In short, I feel your pain but would strongly recommend upgrading to LV 8.2.1.