Intel Visual Fortran on Windows Vista (and VS2005 SP1)

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Intel Visual Fortran 9.1 appears to work fine on Windows Vista, but there are some limitations on Visual Studio to keep in mind. The primary issue is that Visual Studio must be run with Administrator privileges. If you don't do this, the Intel compiler will not start and many other things in VS will not work. For details on how to run Visual Studio with administrator privileges, see Visual Studio 2005 on Windows Vista Issue List

Microsoft does not support Visual Studio.NET 2002 or 2003 on Vista, but I have briefly tested VS.NET 2003 and it seems to work for the purpose of using Intel Visual Fortran, as long as you run it with Administrator privileges as described above. However, this is not officially supported. For more details, see the Visual Studio on Windows Vista FAQ.

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2005 SP1, and I highly recommend that users of VS 2005 with Intel Visual Fortran download and install this, no matter which OS you're running. It fixes several annoying issues with the original VS 2005 including the disabling of the dialog editor and the lack of dependent library linking in VC++ projects. My advice is to uninstall all Intel software developmenttoolintegrations into Visual Studio before applying SP1, and then reinstall the integrations afterward.

There is also a beta of Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista As best as I can tell, all this accomplishes is:

1. Disable the compatibility warning that Windows Vista would otherwise display when you start VS (you would also see this message when installing Intel Visual Fortran's VS integration)
2. Enable a new message screen which shows when you start VS advising you to run VS with adminustrative privileges

Note that if you do start VS 2005 as an adminustrator, you will get a prompt by Windows User Access Control asking you to confirm the action.

I should note for completeness that, at the time of this writing, Intel C++ Compiler does NOT run under Windows Vista. We expect to release an update early in 2007 to resolve that problem.

[jimdempseyatthecove]

Thanks for the tips. Much appreciated

I got my Vista last week but cannot install due to the lack of a signed driver for the Si3114 SATALink RAID disk controller :(

Funny thing (not laughing here) the install will accept the WinXP (Win 2003) driver during installation (finds disks etc..) installs everyting but then on reboot it craps out with a no ticky - no washy. Since distro is on DVD iso image I cannot use the BCDEDIT hack to set the nointegritychecks. Frustrating. The Vista Beta driver from mfg doesn't work either.

For now, I am using Windows Server 2003 on my work station. VS2005 w/IVF 9.1 works fine (so far).

I think my biggest challenge will be to convert the "old" Array Visualizer code to work in x64 mode. Cross my fingers it is a compile and go.

Jim

[a_leonard]

I installed SP1 for VS2005 and now I'm getting thousands of unresolved symbols when I try to build a solution that was just fine before. Any suggestions on what I did wrong?

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I haven't seen this. What kind of symbols are not being found?

[a_leonard]

Subroutines, functions, variables in modules. Tons of them. All of the ones I have looked at so far were OK the last time I built and they haven't changed.

The solution I am trying to build is hundreds of thousands of lines of code in 40 different projects. I'm trying to find something similar but much smaller that has the same problems. I have one solution that shares some of the projects that also has some link errors, but these errors are mostly for external routines that are provided to me in a library. There are some link errors for a C++ funtion that is in my solution. Again, it was OK before today.

[a_leonard]

I think my problem was with the project dependencies. Most, if not all, of the unresolved symbols were routines in one of my projects. There was no dependency declared for the other projects to depend on this one. After fixing the project dependencies, everything is OK.

Has the use of the project dependencies by the linker changed with SP1? Before it seemed that as long as the dependencies were defined so that the build order was correct, the code would compile and link. The main problem I had before with incorrect dependencies was that modules may not have been compiled and the compilation would fail.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

It might be helpful to turn on the Linker property Show Progress > Show All Progress Messages and look to see which objects and libraries are being looked at.

Before SP1, a C++ project would not pull in a Fortran subproject's output library, after SP1 it does. You can also use "dumpbin -symbols" on objects and libraries to make sure that the external names match.

If you need further help, please contact Intel Premier Support.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Before installing VS2005 SP1 or any update to VS, please furst uninstall the Intel Fortran Compiler Integrations and then reinstall them after the update is complete. I have seen reports of problems caused by installing SP1 with the integrations still installed.

[JonShaw]

I have Vista and I can't get the Intel Fortran Compiler to work. From the command line, it appears to compile fine, but I get an error message ".exe has stopped working" when I try to run the executable.

I have also been trying to compile from VS2005 using the Compiler integrations. Here, the build output gets as far as "Embedding manifest..." but no further. There is no error message - apparently it never finishes building.

Any idea what I am doing wrong? I have installed Visual Studio, service packs, compiler and integrations in the suggested order.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Did you follow the recommendation to start Visual Studio with "run as Administrator"? I have not seen a problem running executables.

[JonShaw]

Thanks. Yes I've been running as administrator. I think it is to do with our network - I've discovered I don't have any problem working locally. I will check with our administrator.

[ffmda]

Does it make any difference which version of VS 2005 you get? I have VS.Net 2003 academic, and based on these posts I'm going to upgrade so i can run Fortrran on my new Vista machine.

Also, I haven't been able to install VS 2003 yet - it asks for the pre-requisites disk, which asks for the VS disk 1, etc...

[Steven_L_Intel1]

As far as I know, an academic version of VS2005 should be fine.

[jlizaso]

I got a new machine with Vista so, I was 'forced' to migrate from Compaq Fortran to Intel Fortran. After following all your advice to install patches and Service packages of various types, removing and reinstalling Intel Fortran, running MS Visual Studio 2005 with Administrator privileges, none of your recommendations helped me to getan executable able to perform identical to the one I obtained with Compaq Fortran. Is frustrating how much time I wasted just because someone on your side decided to change defaults.

In Compaq Fortran, local variables are saved by default. In Intel Fortran, they are not. You initialize a local variable, leave the routine, and when you return the variable has a different value, and your program produces garbage.

To fix this, Go to Project and click on your Project-name properties. On your left hand side navigate to Configuration Properties, Fortran, Data. Click on Local Variable Storage, and select All Variables SAVE. Apply, save, and recompile the whole thing. In my case, the new exe has 7,892 KB as oposed to the 4,233 KB of the exe produced with the Compaq Fortran.

Hope this may be helpful to someone.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I'm sorry to hear that this difference caused you problems. In a future update, projects converted from CVF will set this option by default.

I will comment that if your program relies on implicit SAVE semantics, it is not a valid Fortran program. I'd suggest using this opportunity to identify the variables for which SAVE semantics are required and to add an explicit SAVE for them.