New user tutorial - your comments invited

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I've put together a Flash tutorial aimed at introducing new users to Intel Visual Fortran with Visual Studio. We get a LOT of questions on this from people who have difficulty learning it from documentation. It is a work in progress but, as the saying goes, "perfect is the enemy of done", so I'm putting it out there for comments. I know of some places where the pointer movement is weird, but I think in general it holds together. So, please take a look and give me your thoughts.

Some things I already know about:

• Slide showing how to open Visual Studio needs work
• "Create project" is a link, not a "button"
• Pointer doesn't move to OK when creating the project
• In last slide, displayed URL for Doctor Fortran is broken, but the Go button works

I intend to create a bunch more of these on various topics, such as making a project from existing sources, 64-bit projects, mixed-language, etc. Suggestions welcomed.

[ZlamalJakub]

I think that very good will be also tutorial about debugging: breakpoints, watchs, variables, call stack.

Jakub

[Greg_T_]

Hi Steve,
The tutorial videois a great idea and I think it would be worthwhile to make more on other topics. I think this type of tutorial willgeatly help a new user over the first step of the learning curve. Will there be a prominent placement of the tutorial so that a new user will find it easily?

For this introductory tutorial, perhaps it would help a new user to see a simple calculation included?Once the sample project has been opened, would it make the tutorial too long to show a little bit of additional editing for some scalar variables? Perhaps show a variable declaration line being included, such as "real a,b", then set some values, add the two numbers together, and print the result value just after "hello world".

A common question here from new engineers getting stated with Fortranis where are the solution files located. Once the solution has been created and run, perhaps show where the solution files and source code files have been located using Windows Explorer. To reinforce the idea of a solution, perhaps also show this project being reopened from Visual Studio (example of opening an existing solution), then perhaps include the variables and simple calculation. Or perhaps these additional details would be better in a second follow-on tutorial.

Regards,
Greg

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Greg,

These are great ideas - thanks! Yes, more tutorials are planned and yes, prominent placement is also planned.

[jimdempseyatthecove]

>>A common question here from new engineers getting stated with Fortranis where are the solution files located.

And do a similar thing for the Linux / Mac user.

Do not assume the new engineer knows anything about where to place files and folders or how to create folders. This is a common mistake for both environments.

Jim Dempsey

[gib]

Quoting - greg_thorwald

A common question here from new engineers getting stated with Fortranis where are the solution files located. Once the solution has been created and run, perhaps show where the solution files and source code files have been located using Windows Explorer.

Although I've been using DVF-CVF-IVF for many years, I still don't have a clear idea of the best/correct way to set up directory locations for project, solution, source etc. I always seem to have to move stuff around after creating a project, probably because I prefer shorter directory trees. In the tutorial the user is never asked to make a decision about a folder location, which may imply that the conventional approach is to store all projects in a common tree. My IVF projects are scattered all the place, typically with .vproj, .suo, .sln and .f90 files all in the same folder. This is almost certainly not the best practice. A tutorial providing guidance on this issue might be useful.

[DavidWhite]

Quoting - gib

Although I've been using DVF-CVF-IVF for many years, I still don't have a clear idea of the best/correct way to set up directory locations for project, solution, source etc. I always seem to have to move stuff around after creating a project, probably because I prefer shorter directory trees. In the tutorial the user is never asked to make a decision about a folder location, which may imply that the conventional approach is to store all projects in a common tree. My IVF projects are scattered all the place, typically with .vproj, .suo, .sln and .f90 files all in the same folder. This is almost certainly not the best practice. A tutorial providing guidance on this issue might be useful.

Further, along these lines would be instructions for moving and copying projects (and groups of projects) to a new location.

We are supposed to keep independent Dev and Prod areas for our applications, but the complications of maintaining project and solution files in both mean that often the Dev folder is used to produce Production versions, as it is simpler.