How to start a new application from the current one

[ric]

Hi everyone. I'm guessin' if it's possible to start a second application from a current one using the action run (they are exe files, why not?). Do you think it's possible or not?

If not, coul you suggest me any ideas?

Thanks,

[Skylar]

Hi Ric,

Unfortunately spawning another iX application with the "Run" action is not possible. Even though they are ".exe" files, there can still only be one instance of iX Runtime running at a time.

What are you trying to accomplish, perhaps we can accomplish your end goal in another way?

[ric]

Good morning Skylar, the goal I'm trying to accomplish is to start a diagnostic application from the current ix istance, either made in iX. Could you have any ideas to do this?

[Ron L.]

You certainly could start a 2nd application it, it just cannot be an iX Runtime application. Maybe there's another software tool you could use for your diagnostic application for example you could code it using Visual Studio 2008 and some add-on libraries for .NET.

If you want to use iX, then I'd make a password protected screen in the same application instead of trying to spawn a second instance.

[fsturlese]

Hello Ron, we would like to develop the diagnostic as a separate application rather than embedding it in the main project, because our diagnostic is made of more than 20 pages. A separate application would be by far easier to maintain.

Of course we might develop the diagnostic using VB or VS, but in that case we would be half the way to trash iX and make the whole application with VB...

At the moment we are using the Windows shell commands (MS-DOS style) to kill the main application, then launch the iX diagnostic, then kill it and re-launch the main application. It works, but is slow and not very neat...

Any way to improve? What is the reason why two instances of iX can't run at the same time, reentrancy issues or marketing policy?

Thank you,
Federico.

[Ron L.]

According to the information I've gathered, this is by design because there are different tag limits for the run-times depending on the USB dongle purchased. If you could run two instances of iX Developer at the same time, you could cheat the tag limitation of the USB dongle.

Maybe in the future, we should consider letting a USB dongle work for multiple instances.