mspdb80.dll is missing

[Glen_F_1]

We currently have Visual Studios 2005 and Intel FORTRAN version 10.1 running on Windows 7.

Due to some security patches we are required to install, we will lose Visual Studios 2005 permanently.

We'd like to be able to compile and debug software with Eclipse when Visual Studios 2005 goes away.

Step 1 is to compile a FORTRAN program from the command line.

> "C:\Program Files (x86)\Intel\Compiler\Fortran\10.1.011\em64t\bin\ifort.exe" helloWorld.f90

Which pops up a window that says cl.exe System Error - The program can't start because mspdb80.dll is missing from your computer.  Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.

mspdb80.dll is in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE" and this directory is in the PATH.

This all works from within Visual Studio so we must still be missing something in the environment.

Has anyone successfully moved from Visual Studio to Eclipse?

[mecej4]

You should be able to compile, build and run a Fortran program from the command line (one that is properly configured for Ifort) without having Visual Studio, MS C, or the Eclipse IDE, as long as you have the MS SDK components (linker, librarian, C runtime libraries).

The MS C compiler is not required to use the Intel Fortran compiler, so who called CL.EXE? I do not use Eclipse, but here is my guess: Eclipse is spawning a command line window to do some configuration and set some options based on what it finds from an attempted C compilation. You may need to do that configuration manually, instead, if you do not have MS C installed. Please consult the Eclipse documentation, or ask in an Eclipse support forum.

[IanH]

Are you compiling for 64 bit windows?  I see em64t in the path to the compiler.  The relevant ifort executable should already be on the path - you shouldn't need to prefix it with a path.  Is your command prompt environment consistent with whatever you are targeting? 

[Steven_L_Intel1]

The Intel compiler setup script ifortvars.bat adds the path to the MSPDBxx.DLL file to PATH. If you don't have this set up correctly for your Eclipse environment you'll get this error from ifort. I too am a bit puzzled that the message names cl.exe, which I would not expect here. Not ever having used Eclipse on Windows I don't know what it is doing.

Perhaps a useful experiment would be to see if you can compile from a "Fortran Command Prompt" as set up by the shortcut from the Intel installation.

[Glen_F_1]

Thank you!

The ifortvars.bat did the trick.  Now we can compile from the command line.  The next step is to do this in Eclipse and then hook up their debugger.

Is is possible that we could use Visual Studio 2008 with our FORTRAN 10.1 compiler?  That would save us the entire Eclipse conversion effort. 

We are currently using Visual Studio 2005 so we'd have convert our projects to VS 2008.

[mecej4]

Glen F. wrote:

We are currently using Visual Studio 2005 so we'd have convert our projects to VS 2008.

When you try to open a VS2005 project with VS2008, you will probably be asked if you want to allow the project to be converted. If the conversion is successful, you will not have to do anything more to convert.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Yes, 10.1 was supported in VS2008. See https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-parallel-studio-xe-compilers-required-microsoft-visual-studio for the complete matrix.

[Glen_F_1]

Thanks for the chart!  The conversion to Eclipse is unneeded.

[Glen_F_1]

To my surprise, Visual Studio 2005 is bundled with FORTRAN 10.1.  Is that true of all releases of FORTRAN? 

Does some version of Visual Studio come bundled with Intel® Parallel Studio XE 2016?

[Kevin_D_Intel]

Yes, Both the previous Parallel Studio XE 2016 and the current Parallel Studio XE 2017 releases include the Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 Shell. More details are available here, https://software.intel.com/en-us/fortran-compilers/details.

You may also qualify for the free Microsoft Visual Studio Community Edition which is the full-featured MSVS development environment. Read more at, https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/community/

As noted at the table Steve referred to earlier, https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-parallel-studio-xe-compilers-required-microsoft-visual-studio, our products support the Community edition.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

To clarify  - since Intel Visual Fortran 10.0, a Fortran-only development environment based on Visual Studio has been included with Commercial and Academic licenses of the product. Which version of VS the environment is based on varies over time - the article I linked to gives the details.

This is not "Visual Studio" in that it doesn't have any Microsoft language products.