Driver versioning and multiple parallel driver installations

[Intaris]

Before I start, I want to make clear that I am fully aware that my suggestion is probably linked to some crazy amount of work....  That being out of the way:

I often have to switch between LV Versions and have on more than one occasion run into the rpoblem that different versions of LV work with MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE sets of drivers.  This means that I cannot (_for example) have LabVIEW 7.1 and 2011 on the same machine if I need to be coding GPIB functionality over VISA because there is no single VISA version which supports both 7.1 and 2011 (image below).

Of course these days we just fire up a VM with the appropriate drivers but for much hardware (Like PCI or Serial or GPIB) this doesn't work out too well.

Why can't we have some version selection ability for hardware drivers.  Why can't I have VISA 4.0 and 5.1.1 installed in parallel and then make a selection of which version to use in my project definition?  I know that ehse drivers probably share some files on the OS level so it clearly won't work for existing driver packages but for future developmend it would be utterly magnificent to be able to define which version of a hardware driver (Or even LV Toolkit like Vision) should be used ina  project.

Shane.

[JoshuaP]

For what it is worth you can actually use just about any version of NI-VISA with any version of LV.  The only thing you give up is the NI-VISA probes in LabVIEW if you use a version of NI-VISA that doesn't support the version of LabVIEW you are using.

The obvious problem is you can only install one nivisa32.dll in Windows under System32.

However, I would suggest trying to install NI-VISA 5.1.1 and see if everything still works with LV 7.1.  Since VISA is an industry standard it should just work.

I'm less sure about NI-488.2, but I think the same thing applies for it as well.

[metux]

Why don't you just use containers or chroot() installations ?

(schroot is quite handy for that)