View source for EXE has the wrong date

Under some operating systems a built application in LabVIEW versions 5 and 6 (specifically Windows based machines) has the last modified date reported by Windows for the application exe file consistently set to the same value and not to the current date and time? This occurs regardless of the settings of the system clock. It appears that this is a bug in the Windows operating system. As far as we are aware, Microsoft has been aware of it for at least three years but the bug does exist at least under Windows 95 and 98. It is unknown whether the newer versions of Windows (including NT) still exhibit this problem.

The problem occurs when the LabVIEW Appliction Builder copies the standalone stub from the APPLIBS directory (applib.llb) to the exe file and appends the VI code to it. The Windows functions used for this should modify the modified date of the file but leave it at the date of the original stub file. Although NI could theoretically add a manipulation to the Application Builder which really "touches" the file to update the modification date, this is only a workaround for someone elses bug.

There are a couple of user workarounds. If you are not parcelling up your application into distribution disks you can "touch" the built exe with the linux utility of the same name (free downloads of win32 based touch utilities are available on the net; e.g. from the CygWin project.

[http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/ http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/]

Alternatively you could write a small application that reads one byte of the file and then writes that byte back to the file, thereby updating the modification time and date.You could also modify the applib.llb stub file directly just before building the application with either of the touch methods described above. This modification of the stub file will at least ensure that the files heading for the distribution disks end up with a file time and date close to that of the final build process.

[[category:building executables]]