Project Item Templates

[Intel_C_Intel]

If you look in the folder C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8Intel FortranVFProjectItems you will find it contains Source1.f90, Resource.rc, Text.txt and so on, which are mainly empty files. These are the items listed as Visual Studio Installed Templates when you do Project/AddNewItem.

If you add your own template source file, containing standard header comments such as author and creation date, company copyright line, etc. it will also be listed with the other templates when you add a new item to a project.

It would be nice if enhancements like these were documented somewhere so that Fortran users can make use of them. I have found a lot of other things by searching on the web but they mainly seem to work with C#, C++, etc. and not always with Fortran.

Things I would like to add to my simple extension are:
1. Dynamic substitutions of certain tokens, such as author and date
2. Control over naming - I find I get my_template1.f90, my_template2.f90, and so on, which means I have to rename the files afterwards.

I hope this proves useful and would be interested to hear from others regarding Fortran development with Visual Studio.

Regards,

Simon Harding.

[Jugoslav_Dujic]

Been there; the documentation is sparse even for other languages, let alone Fortran (whose FortranTool (config.Tools('VFFortranCompilerTool') members corresponding with compiler options are totally undocumented. I had to resort to a lot of reverse-engineering and guesswork.

I wrote the AppWizard for Xeffort fairly long time ago so I almost forgot the specifics. You can try downloading and installing the library (follow the link from my signature) and study its template generator (by default at C:Program FilesXeffortXeffortAppWizNetScripts1033default.js), especially routines SetCodeStyle and GetTargetName, and study the template files in nearby ..Templates directory. Note that a great deal of template code is parametrized, mostly because I wanted to offer a choice of uppercase/lowercase keywords.

Hope this helps,

[Steven_L_Intel1]

The automation interface for VFProjects will be documented in the next release, though it will assume that you already understand the basics of automation. I think the options will be better documented then too.

[Intel_C_Intel]

Many thanks for these suggestions,

Simon.