MVS 2005 Tutorial - for newbie!

[jjgermis]

Hi,

MVS2005 seems to be very powerful IDE. Since I am new with MVS2005 it seems be very complicated at a firts glance! Are there some tutorial available to help with the getting started process? Especially how to set up the use of the include paths. It seems like I do everthing wrong!

Jacques

[Steve_Nuchia]

There are numerous short (5-15 minutes typically) videos on a wide variety of Visual Studio topics at MSDN.com.

The include paths for both C++ and FORTRAN are set in two different places. But there is no overlap, that's four places total.

In Tools / Options you have settings that are intended for "system" includes (and libraries, etc). These are initialized by the install process and, if modified, are stored per-machine, per-user.

In the project properties dialog you can specify "additional include directories" for each project. I recommend using the VS macro $(SolutionName)foldername;$(SolutionName)anotherfolder format so the same string can be pasted into every project's properties, regardless of the project folder structure.

Note that the project-level properties are stored with the project and thus shared (through source control, if you're using it) with all users. Also note that there are separate settings of this (and most properties) for each combination of Configuration and Platform (Debug|Win32, Release|x64, etc.). You should get in the habit of selecting All Configurations and All Platforms before making a settings change, unless you intend for it to be specific to one setup or another.

If that doesn't answer your question please restate it with a bit more detail.

[jjgermis]

Thanks! I followed your advice and my includes seems to work fine. I did the following:

Tools > Options > IntelFortran > General -> Includes

$(IFORTInstallDir)Include
$(VCInstallDir)include
$(VCInstallDir)atlmfcinclude
$(VCInstallDir)PlatformSDKinclude
$(FrameworkSDKDir)include
C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8VCATLMFCINCLUDE
C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8VCINCLUDE
C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8VCPlatformSDKinclude
C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8SDKv2.0include
C:Program FilesIntelCompilerFortran10.1.021IA32Include
H:VisualStudioUserInclude
%IFORT_COMPILER91%IA32Include

Project > Properties > Fortran > General > Additional Include Directories:

H:VisualStudioUserInclude

The MSDN is quite big with a lot of info on especially other languages. Do you perhaps have some link for a start?

Thanks again for your advice!

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Have you looked in the documentation provided with Intel Visual Fortran? It has a chapter on using Visual Studio.

[Steve_Nuchia]

That's a good way to handle site-specific includes, especially given that IVF doesn't play in the .vsprops inheritance game.

If you're using only fortran there's not whole lot for you on MSDN, but the place to start is the visual studio developer's center ... how about http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2008/bb964532.aspx

There's another developer center for team system if you're using that. The unit testing features now found in the Pro SKU are mostly documented there, since they were down-ported from the Team SKUs.

The only VS feature I can think of, other than basic IDE navigation and understanding "solutions", that might be relevant to fortran-only projects is "deployment". This allows you to set up a project that creates an MSI-based installer, with prerequisites and dependencies, for your program. But it's the worst of all possible tools for building installers so don't try to use it for anything very large.

Likewise unit testing: you can make it work for native-code projects but it's probably not worth the effort, unless you are using TFS and really want test results automatically posted to the project database.

[jjgermis]

Thanks for the advice!

The Intel Forum is really a very helpfull!