VS2005 + IVF 10.1 Crash on Linker Properties Command Line

[swegner]

Hello All,

We are working on upgrading our Visual Studio 2005 C/Fortran solution from IVF 9.1 to IVF 10.1 So far, we are able to build static versions of our libraries, but we are having trouble with DLLs. As soon as it would get to the Fortran DLL project, Visual Studio would crash. I've narrowed the problem down as follows:

-- All dependency projects of the Fortran DLL project can be build successfully,
-- All Fortran source files can be compiled for the Fortran DLL project
-- As soon as I hit "Build" or "Link" for the project (after building dep's and compiling source), Visual Studio crashes; there is no build output either in the IDE or saved as a log file.

Then, I was looking through the Project Properties for settings that may be the culprite. When I click on the tab for Linker > Command Line, Visual Studio crashes. This happens whether I try to build beforehand or not. It happens everytime.

The next thing I tried was to start looking at which settings might be affecting it. I notice that if I change the Linker > General > "Output File" field back to , then I can view the Linker > Command Line tab without crashing. However, if I change the "Output File" to a different value, I still get crash. Although I don't think it's the true cause, it is currently set to:

$(OutDir)hdf5_fortranddll.dll

where OutDir is:
......proj$(ProjectName)$(ConfigurationName)

ProjectName=hdf5_fortrandll
ConfigurationName=debug

I've tried setting a few other Linker options to , but still get the crash, so perhaps it is in-fact related to the Output File.

Is anybody else having issues like this? I assume that perhaps there's some setting in our Project file that isn't compatible from 9.1 to 10.1, and perhaps resetting the Output File name is "clensing" it. It's hard to say what though.

Scott

[swegner]

Aha!

After debugging into this a little more, I finally found the problem.

I opened the *.vfproj project file that was causing these errors in a text editor to see if I could find anything useful. It turns out that the Output File in the linker settings wasn't set to "$(OutDir)hdf5_fortranddll.dll", but actually "$(OutDir)hdf5_fortranddll.dll " (three trailing spaces). Removing these three spaces seems to fix everything.

We were previously using these project files with Intel Visual Fortran 9.1, which was resilient to this typo. It wasn't until IVF 10.1 when we started getting these crashes. I don't know what changed exactly, but I think there should be some better error handling-- either parse it correctly as 9.1 did, or display a useful error message. Crashing Visual Studio at the Project Properties screen made it very hard to debug.

Scott