Premier Support has hosed me good

[mawood]

Hi.I haveVista. We are nearing the end of a time critical project.I needed to run your FORTRAN compiler on that machine. I asked premier support if you Fortran compiler would work on Vista AND MS Visual Studio 2008. After 3 days wait, they said 'Yes' and immediately closed the issue.

So I bought the MS Visual Studio 2008 (list price $799.99) from the UCSD bookstore. Its in a brown plastic box with an official Microsoft seal of authenticity on it. I installed it and then I tried to install your Fortran compiler (10.1 Build 20070913 Package ID: w_fc_p_10.1.011). The compiler can not find an IDE which is strange because I had just loaded one which premier support said would work.

Now premier support says that they are sorry for the inconvenience and that they made a mistake and they go on to tell me that MS VS 2008 will be support in the next compiler release. So I ask them just when that might be and they come back and basically tell me that according to some people they talked to, MS VS 2008 is not officially released and its basically my fault and I'll just have to wait. Still no word on how long a wait that is.

I'm pretty much disgusted. My boss is going to have a stroke when he hears of the money we watsed and the time we've lost.

Any word on support for this obviously released Microsoft product?

Mark Wood

UCSD Radiology

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Mark,

I am sorry that the response you got was poorly worded. I can see how you interpreted it the way you did, but the intent was to say that support for VS2008 would be added after the public release of VS2008, which is, I think, scheduled for the end of February. We are aware that Microsoft has made it available to MSDN subscribers and some educational customers.

You should be able to use the included VS2005 Premier Partner Edition. Please download w_fc_p_10.1.013.exe (not one with NOVSPPE in the name or _IA32 in it). We had intended to have our VS2008 support available already, but Microsoft made significant changes in the internal interfaces before release that broke our code. We needed time to understand and adjust for the changes and then do adequate testing. At this time, we expect to have an update out in March to support VS2008.

Again, I apologize for the misunderstanding. Please let me know if you have difficulties installing the included VS2005.

[TimP]

In addition to the suggestions Steve made, you can use ifort command line window with VS2008 by editing the ifortvars.bat and ifort.cfg files in the compiler installation. Simply accept the error and complete the installation, then change those files to conform with VS2008. We can send examples if you like.

[mawood]

Thankx Steve and Tim,

I may try the download you suggest in the near future, but because the project must move forward, I'm going to get off the bleeding edge and put this on an XP machine with MS VS 2003 for the time being. I know that works.

I did have one question re: Tim's response. It was similar to one of the solutions that Premier Support eventually offered. Do those changes to ifortvars.bat and ifort.cfg files result in me being able to use the compiler from theMS VS 2008 IDE or just the compiler from the command line? I'm thinking its just from the command line, which would a little too minimalist for this project... Either way, thankx for the suggestion..

Thankx also to Steve for your comments and workaround. If you could send the Premier Support folks the following link, they and then others like me might greatly benefit from it. They still are not convinced.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/default.aspx

Mark

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Mark,

The edits Tim suggested would enable use from the command line only. You will need to use VS2003 or VS2005 until the VS2008 IDE support is released.

We're aware of the link you posted. As it says, VS2008 was "released to manufacturing" and that MSDN subscribers can download it now. The product has not been launched at retail yet - that is coming in February. I know it may seem a silly distinction, and if MS hadn't broken the internal interfaces we'd be ready with support. Unfortunately, that's the way it usually goes. The other thing at work is our release cycle and resources available to do testing and packaging of an update. We'll get it out there as soon as we can, but it's still going to be a while.

All of the support engineers have gotten the message reinforced about what to tell customers who ask about VS2008. I'm sorry that we led you astray.