It might be better to step back and examine the reasons that you need to have different versions on the same machine. There might be a better solution to you application. Usually with TS there are many ways to solve a problem. With that in mind below is some information on the topic.
As of TS 2.0 you have the option to install different versions of TestStand in a different directory. You cannot run both at the same time because all versions of TestStand use the same ActiveX server names and IDs. However, you are provided a switcher program as of TestStand 2.0 (see
\National Instruments\shared\TestStandVerSelect)that allows you to switch between the TS version that you want to run. This program takes command line arguments so that you can switch
programmatically. To see the available arguments run the programm with the argument "/?". This application simply unregisters the files used by current TS version and registers the files of the selected TS version. The list of these files are kept in the corresponding ini file. The different version sections in the ini file correspond to the registry entries mentioned below, from with the TS application path is retrieved.
For each version installed, there is a different registry entry that refers to the installation directory of each TestStand application. There is no built in capability of switching between 2 installations that use the same version of TestStand (same registry entry with only one application path).
There maybe tricks (e.g. registry editing, creating different files that have different lists of TS search directories, modifying the version selector ini file, etc.) that you could use to switch between to installations of the same TS version, however, I would no
t encourage you to go in that direction since you'd be using unsupported techniques that might not be consistant in future versions of TestStand. Perhaps your application has a more straight forward solution.
