Hello,

Been a long time, there was no article from my end. So , today i would be discussing with you'll, how to package National Instruments LabView. Now most application of this vendor comes with optional command line parameters which can deployment easier. National Instruments LabView can be installed silently be passing the EXE an XML file as a command line parameter. This XML file contains the responses that you entered while installing the application. Other command line options can be found by checking the help options of Setup.EXE for labview by entering the command line as "Setup.exe /?" This will open up the command line parameters that can be passed to the EXE.
Be very carefull while creating the response XML files, as the installation option that appear during actual installation and that during creating response files are entirely different.

Depending on the type of EXE's you wish to deploy there are different command line parameters available to LabView. I will share with you, two most common command line parameters

1. <Path to Setup.exe> /generatespecfile <Name of the folder where you wish to create nisuite.xml>
2. <Path to Setup.exe> /generatespecfile <path of the file where you wish to create nisuite.xml>

There is another aspect to this response file. Its processor specific. So if you are thinking, creating an xml file on 32-bit machine will make it work on 64bit or vice versa, its not the case  bud. So in case if the application is supposed to be deployed on two different platforms separate XML files need to be created.

Now obviously , post deployment one would like to get rid of unwanted pop-ups and updates that application presents

so, for suppressing welcome screens search for the following registry. Now here is the key point. Launch all the shortcuts once so, that all the settings get stored in the following reg key , which can later be used during deployment

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\National Instruments\Assistant Applications

Done with welcome dialogs, now lets come to suppressing updates.This setting resides in an INI file LabView.INI. Under this INI file, look for the following

IsFirstLaunch=False
GSW_RSSCheckEnabled=False
showTipStrings=False
skipNavigatorDialog=True

This will get rid of updates, tip of day, and welcome dialogs if any , surfacing for any shortcuts

Hope u find the KB article helpful.