Visual Studio Integration and MSBUILD support

[Timothy_W_]

Hi

I am working on a legacy Fortran 77 code base with C/C++ code.  I have converted the projects to Visual Studio 2015 and Intel Parallel Professional 2017.  

I found that because of the large use of includes in the Fortran code, the dependency calculations is very slow.   I have sent Intel Support a project that demonstrates this issue.  I will be exploring other build systems to see if they can do better, like waif, Scons, cmake etc.  It is a pain that even small changes takes minutes,  some of which Visual Studio is frozen, before I can get a build.

I also can't create global properties in Visual Studio to set defaults for all the Fortran projects.  They must be set separately and carefully be reviewed to make sure they are all set the same.  If I need to change it, I must manually change it in each project which is tedious.

I was hoping that the Intel Fortran would start using msbuild in the integration with visual studio.  I was just told by Intel Support that this is planned but it is low priority.  It won't happen for 2018.

I wonder how others are building their C/C++/Fortran projects on Windows and are they satisfied with the integration with Visual Studio?  I am not, coming from working on C++ projects.  It seems a second class citizen.  It is buggy, sometimes refuses to save, and sometimes fails to compile.  It reports something like "Error: the operation can't be performed".  

I think that msbuild support might help.  If others think so, could they contact Intel Support and ask for msbuild support?  Maybe if there is enough of us, msbuild will become a higher priority.

Otherwise, is there any tricks that people use in Visual Studio?  Especially setting global Fortran settings instead of editing each project. Has anyone else seen dependency management issues?  I have thousands of little Fortran files each including maybe 10 to 20 files.

If people are interested, I can post an example project that takes a long time to build if it builds at all.

Thanks

Tim

[jansson]

Hi Tim,

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I also can't create global properties in Visual Studio to set defaults for all the Fortran projects.  They must be set separately and carefully be reviewed to make sure they are all set the same.  If I need to change it, I must manually change it in each project which is tedious.
--

About setting identical properties in several projects in VS:

You might select several projects in the "Solution Explorer", (click while pressing shift or Ctrl keys)
then right click and select "Properties",
In the new "Property Page" window appearing you _might_ be able to select "All" or "Multiple Configuration" except the other configurations you might have introduced, and depending on what type of projects you have selected.

After this you only need to set/change a property once to make them agree in all selected projects.

Hope this was a solution to one of your problems.

Cheers,

Magnus