Driver Station Update fails to install

[Crossle86]

Joe,
Just read your post. I am an experienced Windows developer and I also showed the DS program to another one of our mentors, who happens to be a Microsoft employee and a lead on the Windows team. Some observations:

1) I caused the create date of the DS program to change by copying it, which I did while trying to figure out why I was not getting the updated program when I renamed driverstation.exe to driver station.exe. Still no explanation for that but I am willing to drop it since I seem to have the updated program in place now.

2) Windows programs should always use a hard coded version or version based on the internal assignment of the 4 part windows version number, major.minor.build.fix or as I like to do major.minor.fix.build. If you use visual studio, all this can be managed automatically and your program can display the version embedded in the exe. If you are using LabView, then you have to manage the hard coded version yourself.

3) This version should be displayed in the application title bar though many developers leave off the build in the title bar. The title bar version and the version displayed by the app should not be of different forms.

4) Using file dates is not at all a good idea since the user can "change" the program version number.

5) Don't forget about the Driver user shell program not getting renamed. After a successful install of the update, the Driver user still runs the old program (hence the renaming I am doing). Note that I could have tweaked the registry to the correct program name, but I have our DS PCs set up to allow switching between the 2015 and 2014 DS programs as we still run last years robots quite a bit for demos and having the DS program name the same facilitates this switching. I know the 2015 is supposed to let you switch protocols, but this did seem to work when we first installed 2015 so we did it ourselves. And doing it ourselves allows us to switch out the custom display program we have for the upper part of the DS display.

Sorry if I am stating the obvious but I felt bound to mention all this due to the time I have spent on this version numbering issue.

Thanks for responding to my posts.