Today I had an interesting usage of R25. I understand not every organization is upgrading to R25 as it has just been released, it is still possible to take advantage of some of its features. Given that R25 can be installed next to 22.1, you can potentially use both (albeit carefully). As always, before you open anything in a new build, ensure you have a backup of your current project folder.

Since I have both 22.1 and R25 installed, I came across a weird issue that I knew R25 had accounted for. In this case, I took advantage of the expanded project analysis features in R25 to determine with a 22.1 project was misbehaving. Once I identified the issue, I opened the original project in 22.1 and made the changes there.

When you open a 22.1 project in R25, it must be upgraded. It will allow you to specify a new folder to perform the upgrade to. If you elect to do this, you will now have a duplicate copy of your project in R25 leaving your 22.1 project untouched. You want to make sure you have a backup of your project before you do this, just in case you forget, but if you do select a new folder, your 22.1 folder will remain untouched. You can then use the new features of R25 to run project analysis, see the new event overview, or the Automation Overview. You won't be able to make changes and then copy those back to your 22.1 project, but these features are helpful and can be done on a copy of your current code.