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Compiler installation error messages question

dajum
Novice
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We see the attached picture of an error message from the compiler installation.  It lists VS Express 2015 as being an acceptable version of VS to use with the compiler.  But the system requirements do not list VS Express 2015.  Can you explain the difference?

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18 Replies
TimP
Honored Contributor III
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It appears to say VS2010 Express is acceptable for IA32 mode only.  VS2015 community, pro, shell etc. are supported, including intel64.

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dajum
Novice
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What do you mean by etc?  I don't see 2015 Express listed anywhere in the system requirements.  Can you post where you see Express is allowed in the system requirements? It specifically mentions only 2012, and 2013 Express for intel64 mode. 


 

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Kevin_D_Intel
Employee
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This appears to be an oversight in the PSXE 2016 Release Notes. When support for Visual Studio 2015 was added this intended to include the Express Edition when using the command-line tools only on IA-32 and Intel 64. I will confirm this and notify our Release Note maintainer about this.

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Steven_L_Intel1
Employee
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In my opinion, we should not support VS Express at all. It provides no Fortran functionality beyond that of the Windows SDK and confuses users who look for support of Fortran in the VS IDE. Now that there is a VS Community Edition, the usefulness of the Express Edition is minimal.

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dajum
Novice
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Thanks for the info, looks like Express should work.

Our biggest issue is that we end up with lots of users who try to compile/link our code and get the *link* not found error.  This happens for a lot of different reasons, but almost all of them are because of an installation issue.  Sometimes there is no VS installed, sometimes it is there and can't be found as the environment isn't set correctly even after what seem to be clean installations.  So the compiler is there, but not the linker.  And we try to support every possible combination of compiler versions and VS version.  It is difficult to document the choices available, and still end up with a setup that works.  We are trying to help our users, but it seems how to install changes very frequently.

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Steven_L_Intel1
Employee
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I have asked our install team to not allow installation to continue when the end result is an unusable product. The strategy in the past has been to give a warning but allow the install to complete, assuming the user will then figure out how to make manual adjustments for their configuration. This isn't a realistic view, in my opinion, as the majority of users just blindly click through and then get frustrated when they can't build.

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dajum
Novice
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That will be a great help to us.  Even better would be if it told them how to fix it.

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dajum
Novice
552 Views

Okay we have installed 2015 Express and when we ran the IVF installer it gives the error message I have shown.  That says Express 2015 is acceptable, and yet it is not, yet fails to complete the installation.  So what is wrong with our installation? Is Express valid or not? And what do we have to do to figure out why it isn't a good install?

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Steven_L_Intel1
Employee
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There are four different VS2015 Express editions. Which one did you install? "For Desktop" ought to have worked, as long as you don't mind doing everything from the command line. 

I see you are posting from a company email address - if you buy the commercial license for Intel Parallel Studio XE, it installs VS2013 Shell along with the necessary tools and libraries to do Fortran development. Why are you using VS2015 Express? If you are evaluating, you can download a free trial of VS2015 or install the free VS2015 Community Edition. I don't see any good reason to use the Express editions anymore unless you are going to be selling products based on the MS C++ compiler.

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dajum
Novice
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We did install the For Desktop version.  All the details are in the attached picture.  And we did try to do everything from the command line.  This is what is so frustrating is that it seems like it should work, but it doesn't.  And figuring out why not isn't easy for us.  That's why I asked if there is a good method to figure it out. I will say I don't think I have ever seen in your system requirements that it states what version of Express will work.  That seems to be a short coming of the instructions if it doesn't work for all of them, and you don't specify the one needed. Maybe you could add that to your requirements if not all versions will work.

We do own multiple licenses at our company as we write software.  But our product requires our customers to also have a compiler.  We sell them compilers too.  But even when our customers have a license, they often get compiler installations that don't work. And when we have customers that want to try our software, they get a trial version of the your compiler since they don't want to buy a license for a compiler to try our software.  Hence we have to know how to tell them what to get and why it doesn't work when they "follow" the installation instructions. Some of our customers have various versions of VS already installed. So they try and get the compiler to work with what they have installed.  That runs into trouble when all the right features are not installed, or it isn't an acceptable version.  I myself didn't realize you could have VS Express installed, and it wouldn't work. The last few versions have caused more issues for us since the Shell isn't available for trial versions. So we are trying to figure out how to help our customers and potential customers get running quickly when they encounter errors.  Again, the need to understand how to diagnose some of these issues quickly.  I've had customers (with intel licenses) tell me it was too confusing to ask Intel for support via the registration center. Navigating your websites has become harder the last couple years, and it seems to change frequently.  So again we try to stay on top of it.
 

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Kevin_D_Intel
Employee
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If we can obtain some installation logs from your system that could be helpful and would be appreciated.
 
On your system, please look under C:\Users\<yourUsername>\AppData\Local\Temp for a folder named like “pset_tmp_PSXE2016_<yourUsername>” or “pset_tmp_ComposerXE2016_<yourUsername>".
 
Whichever folder you have should contain installation detail in the form of log files. If you have tried installing multiple times then you will have multiple date/time-stamped folders from all installation attempts.

If you could zip up the latest date/time-stamped folder for the failed installation and attach it to the issue, or via private reply (Send Author A Message) if you prefer, we can have our installation team inspect those for details about why the installation is failing.

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dajum
Novice
552 Views

Hi Kevin,

This testing is being done by another engineer here.  She went in and searched for log files you suggested and there were none.  She is doing this on VMware machines.  I found out she aborted the installs after getting the message (that I attached earlier) said that IVF wouldn't work because none of the supported environments was found on the computer.  She went back and continued the installation as if that message didn't occur, and found that IVF did work.  We think this message is very misleading, if not flat out wrong.  It certainly caused her to assume it was not worth continuing the installation. Maybe you have an idea why there are no install logs. I would send them if found.  We did a complete search for COMPOSER and didn't find any on the machine.  We haven't had time to try another installation.  But maybe you have an explanation for the error message for us without the log files.

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Steven_L_Intel1
Employee
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The name may not include "Composer". The way I find these is to open a directory window and type %TEMP% into the address bar. Then I look for folders whose names start with "pset_. It may be "pset_tmp_PSXE2016_username"

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dajum
Novice
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We did actually look in just about every directory there, and made several searches.  No log file to be found. 
 

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Kevin_D_Intel
Employee
552 Views

I confirmed with our installation engineering team the installer is not correctly detecting the Visual Studio 2015 Express Edition (Desktop). I submitted a defect report (see internal tracking id below) to have this corrected. We apologize for the obvious confusion and inconvenience this caused.

I also discussed correcting our Release Notes for support for the VS 2015 Express Edition (Desktop) with our RN maintainers. The particular Express Edition variants we support are those with a Microsoft native C++ compiler. Finding an official Microsoft resource that divulges that detail for the various Express editions is proving difficult. From an external resource, Wikipedia, and as Steve already said, Express for Desktop for sure includes this compiler, and maybe the Express for Windows. We will obtain/add definitive information in our RNs to help with that shortcoming noted.

Again, our apologies.

(Internal tracking id: DPD200381796)

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dajum
Novice
552 Views

Thanks Kevin.  We'll look for the update.

 

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Kevin_D_Intel
Employee
552 Views

Our Install Developers verified the changes to properly detect the Visual Studio 2015 Express Edition (Desktop) are in our latest Intel® Parallel Studio XE 2016 Update 3 Release. Thank you for your patience.

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dajum
Novice
552 Views

Thanks Kevin.

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