Visual Studio integration and Fortran licence renewal

[Martin__Paul]

Hello,
We have a solution in Visual Studio with a number of Fortran and Visual C++ projects. Last year we upgraded from VS2008 to 2010 and were forced to upgrade the Fortran compiler as the version we were using at the time (11.1) did not integrate with 2010. We recently upgraded to Visual Studio 2012 to take advantage of new language features, only to discover that Composer 2011 does not integrate with VS2012. Fortunately we were covered by the 12 month maintenance window when Composer 2013 was released, so can move ahead with our plan to migrate to 2012.

I am concerned that we will find ourselves being forced to upgrade Fortran Composer again when we upgrade to a future release of Visual Studio just because there is no integration with our existing Composer versin, not because we require the latest compiler. I understand that the maintenance renewal price is only valid for up to a year after the expiry date, after which time a new licence should be-purchased to use the latest release. Following price restructuring at Intel the unit licence cost has increased. Maintenance renewal is around two thirds the cost of a new licence.

With a team of over twenty users it is clearly uneconomical to renew maintanance every 18 months or so solely to fix integration with Visual Studio. Could Intel provide backwardly-compatible integration libraries for a small fee to allow us to continue to benefit from new Visual Studio features? Is there a partner program that provides bulk renewal options at an affordable cost?

Thanks.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

We support three versions of Visual Studio at a time, typically a span of 5-6 years. Microsoft keeps making incompatible changes requiring us to redo our integration each time they have a new release. (Visual Studio 2013 is coming up - we will support that soon after its release.)

You may want to consider floating licenses to support many developers. This can be more cost effective, depending on how you use the product. I can have one of our Business Development Managers contact you to talk about pricing if you'd like.

[Martin__Paul]

Thanks Steve, we'll look into floating licences.  I'll contact our reseller for more detail in the first instance but will come back to you if we can't find what we need.

Regarding Composer 2013, does this means it will work with the release of Visual Studio that comes after VS2013?

[TimP]

The new release last week was designated as Composer XE2013 SP1, which continues to support VS2008, 2010, and 2012.  At least a future update of XE2013 SP1 would be needed to support VS2013.  If Microsoft then dropped support for VS2008, I suppose Intel also would drop that support in the new update. I'd guess there might be yet another update of Intel compilers by the time a successor to VS2013 showed up.

As Steve said, the compiler team has responded quickly to new VS releases.  For single step upgrades such as updating to a new version to support the next VS, the compiler team has managed in the past to preserve object level compatibility, so your previous .obj (at least those built with XE2013 or 2013 SP1) would continue to work with the updated libraries.

I'm afraid there is a possibility of confusion with the version name changes coming from marketing at Microsoft and Intel.  I would agree that revisions come more frequently than many customers would like.

[IanH]

There has been some talk recently that Microsoft will be increasing their update frequency for Visual Studio (e.g. VS 2013 is not far off even though it wasn't that long ago that 2012 was released and it seems like only yesterday that I moved to VS2010).  What's that likely to mean for Intel's VS integration efforts?

[Steven_L_Intel1]

We will continue to keep up with what Microsoft supports. A lot will depend on release cycles (theirs and ours) as to when we'll support new VS versions. Our own release cycle is yearly and, so far, has been pretty close to Microsoft's, but that could change. VS2013 is a relatively minor update to VS2012, from our perspective. Microsoft keeps hinting at some major redesign of VS in the future, though they've put this off several times already. We'll do what we have to, but it has a significant cost to us to keep supporting old VS versions, and we don't go back and add support for new VS versions to old compiler versions. What this boils down to is that if you feel the need to update your VS version, you may also need to update your Fortran version as well.