Try the 6.5 to 6.6 upgrade!

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Release Candidate 1 of the CVF 6.5 to 6.6 upgrade is available for folks here to try out. The actual CVF software is final - but I'd like some further testing of the installation process before we start burning this to CDs.

Requirements - you must have currently installed CVF X86 6.5 or 6.5A, either Standard or Pro. No other versions work with this, including beta 6.6 versions. (If you were beta-testing 6.6, uninstall and delete DFOR*.DLL from the Windows System folder. Then reinstall 6.5. Or wait for us to offer an upgrade from the 6.6 "Sanity" kit.)

Installation is like the other CVF upgrades. Download CVF-65-66.exe (44.2MB). Run it and follow the prompts.

If you try it, please reply here and tell me how it went.

Steve

[Intel_C_Intel]

Good to see that you have the documentation problem that other users are experiencing fixed. I refrained from following up on my particular problem in the interim so as not to confuse the issue for other readers, but getting back to it: I copied *.CHI and *.CHM from CD-ROM to hard disk and now C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual StudioDF98DOC has 188 files, 149 MB. Subsequently I did the attrib trick you outlined earlier in the thread. But still no joy. Attempting to get to the documentation for LineTo (as in another thread in c.l.f.) still requires me to insert the CD-ROM. Browsing to the above-mentioned directory in the error box that appears when I attempt to access the documentation for LineTo results in the error box reappearing and hitting the &ltENTER> key a few more times just results in a "The page cannot be displayed" page. Am I missing something simple or is there another step remaining in my odyssy?

[james1]

Installed fine for me over 6.5a Pro under WinXP Pro build 2505.

[Intel_C_Intel]

Installation is fine, but I got internal compiler error (C0000005) on CVF 6.6. I upgraded from CVF 6.5A.

The function is like:
function func(ext_fn)
where ext_fn is external function.

What can I do with this bug?

toppo

[Intel_C_Intel]

Notes... 2 minute download (after your server came back up) and 1 minute install ... at least your upgrades are getting quicker for the user to apply. There was a problem with the upgrade from 6.0A to 6.5 IIRC and also with this (6.5A to 6.6 on Win2k Build 2195, SP1) upgrade that some help file (does DFMAIN.CHM ring a bell?) wasn't found on the hard disk and I had to insert my CD-ROM and browse to it to proceed with installation. There was another file the installation program complained about, too, but after I doubleclicked the first file the installation completed normally. The name of the menu item under Start|Programs is still 'Visual Fortran 6.0' -- I wish your installation programs would fix that. Under Help|About Developer Studio one gets the right version, though.

Tried a few benchmarks. Results were mostly a bit faster. In the polyhedron suite, I noticed that you produce a (valid) warning in INDUCT.F90 that either you didn't before or I didn't notice before. What happened in RNFLOW.F90? I see that you got tired of getting clobbered in WH4.FOR. And what about SM4.FOR? Oh, you naughty boys & girls ... John will probably have to uncomment the line

C if ( sum.gt.1E30 ) print *,i,j,k,m,sum

so that your latest upgrade doesn't just throw the whole thing out.

[Intel_C_Intel]

Upgrade from 6.5A was smooth enough for me, it just happened. I have a Win2000 machine.
However, I have noticed a glitch. When trying to open the on-line documentation via
the short cut on the start menu, it pointed to
C:WINNTHH.exe "C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual StudioDF98DOCdf60.col"
instead of
C:WINNTHH.exe "C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual StudioDF98DOCdfmain.chm"
after amending that it seams to work.

/Bjrn

[Steven_L_Intel1]

toppo - please send a problem report to us at vf-support@compaq.com, and include the problem source. Be sure to mention that you're using 6.6 (from the upgrade I posted on the forum).

James, your observations with the Polyhedron suite are consistent with our own. RNFLOW is still being looked at.

Bjrn, this upgrade doesn't touch the shortcuts (indeed, that's why the name is still wrong). DF60.COL is the correct file for the help shortcut. What happens to you when you try to use DF60.COL?

BTW, the UI and almost all of the logic of these upgrades are written in Fortran.

Steve

[Intel_C_Intel]

Steve,

I had a similar problem with the help files except the other one that the installaition complained about was mts.chm. I was able to locate the first file in the docs subdirectory, but browsing to it and double clicking on it did nothing. Apparently, it wanted me to find both of the files before allowing me to proceed. Anyway, I cancelled out of it and the installation proceeded without another hitch.

Tom

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Yes, the upgrade wants to find a folder that has both dfmain.chm and mts.chm in it. This is if you are referencing the documentation from CD-ROM. I'll take another look at that section and see if I can improve it. If you have all of the documentation installed to hard disk, this isn't an issue.

Steve

[marklewy]

Steve,

After upgrading my CVF 6.5A Standard Edition, the CVF 6.6 help now only contains the Platform SDK help. I remember having similar problems upgrading from 6.0 to 6.1 - the workaround that time was to re-install CVF from scratch.

I'm running Windows 2000 Professional SP1.
Visual C++ 6.0 Enterprise edition SP5 is also installed.

Mark.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I wish I could reproduce this problem with the docs here. Mark, did you get any message about locating the documentation files?

I have an idea - go to Tools..Options..Help System and select Compaq Visual Fortran as your preferred help collection.

Steve

[Intel_C_Intel]

The darned thing about the missing DFMAIN.CHM (or whatever) file is that when I installed 6.0A from the CD-ROM, I thought I was installing everything (by selected custom install and checking all boxes) but you're telling me that I am missing something, either due to failure to scroll down to one of the boxes during my initial installation, or due to a bug in the original installation program itself. CVF documentation seems to work OK, though. What am I missing that I should have on my hard disk? It would be just groovy if the upgrade programs would give me the option to install whatever it is that I seem to be missing rather than just telling me that I'm missing it.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

The DVF 6.0 installation did not, by default, copy all of the MS Platform SDK documentation to your hard disk. We changed that in 6.1, or perhaps 6.5. The upgrade is supposed to be able to handle having some of the documentation on the hard disk and the rest referenced from CD - it always does for me - but I have heard from many customers for whom it doesn't. I wish I knew why. The simple solution is to copy all of the .CHI and .CHM files from the INFODFDOC folder of the CD-ROM to the DF98DOC folder of your hard disk and rerun the upgrade.

Steve

[Intel_C_Intel]

The simple solution would be for the installation program to check to see if the files are there (which it already does, hence the error in finding the files), and, if it can't find the files, install them into the DOCS subdirectory and then go along its merry way.

Tom

[Intel_C_Intel]

As I said, I didn't use the default installation, but rather the custom installation and tried to install everything. Evidently this didn't happen. I looked in C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual StudioDF98DOC and found DFMAIN.CHI (7/9/01 5:40 A 233 KB) DFMAIN.CHM (7/9/01 5:40 A 3.59 MB) and MTS.CHI (6/12/98 5:24 A 79.9 KB) so I tried simply running the 6.6 upgrade again and once again got the message:

Some of the online documentation is being referenced from CD-ROM. Click OK to browse for the folder containing documentation files DFMAIN.CHM and MTS.CHM, (usually the INFODFDOC folder of your Visual Fortran CD-ROM), or Cancel to omit missing manuals from the collection.

Note the double-backslashes... thought you were writing a C string when you were writing a Fortran string? At this point I inserted the 6.0A CD-ROM and clicked OK and the installation program automatically navigated to the folder mentioned in the message. This time I doubleclicked on MTS.CHM but after completion of the installation, that file still hadn't been copied to my hard disk. Consequently I copied it by hand using Windows Explorer and reran the installation. This time there was no error message. All that work and the installation program didn't even want to update the MTS.CHM file! Your advice to copy *.CHM and *.CHI and rerun the upgrade is rather more cryptic out here in end-user land that you might think. Is there an easy way to do the copy without creating second versions or overwriting existing files? Are we supposed to rerun the 6.5 upgrade, then the 6.6 upgrade, or just the 6.6 upgrade? Life would be easier out here if the installation program gave us the option to copy everything over to the hard disk where it belonged in the first place (I don't know why this didn't happen on the initial custom install) rather leaving us guessing about the next component that might have been omitted in the original installation.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

If MTS.CHI was in your DOC folder and not MTS.CHM, that means you did not select to have the Platform SDK manuals installed to your hard disk. (The CHI is the index only, the CHM is the actual manual.)

The upgrade is not attempting to copy the CHM file - it merely wants to know where it is, so it can register it with the documentation collection. If you manually copied MTS.CHM, and reran the upgrade, you will probably find that when you open the VF help collection that there is just one platform SDK manual there instead of the dozens that should be there. If you want everything, copy all the CHM files and run the upgrade again.

The SDK docs are 125MB, so I don't know if people would appreciate having those copied over! But I suppose I can offer it as an option.

Steve

[Intel_C_Intel]

Steve,

Maybe (probably) I'm missing something in this discussion, but, as I said earlier, it would be simpler to copy the two offending files into the appropriate folder if the installation program cannot find them and then go about its business. The file sizes are < 4 Mb total, so this shouldn't be a major inconvenience once they are compressed. I don't see any need to install all the SDK help files if they weren't originally installed, just the ones that the 6.6 upgrade installation program is looking for.

Again, maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that the goal of installation programs is to make the installation seamless. Copying the two files (as opposed to the entire SDK help system) would solve the problem?

Tom

[marklewy]

Steve,

My current help collection was Fortran, so no joy there, I'm afraid. The upgrade program did ask me to locate dfmain.chm, so I used the one on the 6.x to 6.5 upgrade CD.

I decided to reinstall CVF from scratch. So, I uninstalled CVF, and re-installed it
from the 6.0CD, the 6.x to 6.5 Upgrade CD, and CVF-65-66.exe. I did a complete custom install from the 6.0 CD so all the documentation is on the hard drive.

Unfortunately, the help is still not working properly. The root for my help is titled "Compaq Visual Fortran 6.6". The only book beneath it is "Platform SDK", and the default page is "Built-in ASP Objects Reference". This applies whether the help is invoked from Developer Studio or from the Online Documentation start menu entry.

Help was working OK in 6.5 before I did the upgrade.

Mark.

[sabalan]

I have W2K Pro and had CVF 6.5a Pro. The installation was smooth and painless. No problems with help files etc. discussed here. A minor observation: Tools | Options? | Help System is still showing "Compaq Visual Fortran 6.5 (7/11/2000)" while the HTML help itself shows "Compaq Visual Fortran 6.6" in the Contents window.

Coming to Array Viewer, "The "black border problem" due to a bug in Microsoft's OpenGL implementation for Windows 2000" is fixed as promised (see here)
BUT, is it possible to fix a bug without creating some other(s)? Apparently not! Try to view an ARRAY(3,600) while debugging. In the array viewer click on the button for "Vector Graph": the graph is going to disappear and the graph window is going to hang! You can not go back to "Plane Graph" either! You are saved only if you try to change the size of the array viewer window. Only then you can see your "Vector Graph" and can carry on.

Another thing that I have noticed, both in 6.5a and 6.6, is that if you view an array while debugging, stop debugging, run the program again to the break point and view the array, stop debugging, and repeat this a few times (varying between 2 and 7 times for me), then the Developer Studio is going to hang (Program not responding). Some memory leakage due to Array Visualizer?

Regards,
Sabalan

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Tom,

Let me try again. The upgrade is looking for DFMAIN.CHM and MTS.CHM as "markers" that help it identify a place where all of the online documentation can be found. It does not want to copy these files, it simply wants to know where to find a folder containing both of them. In an installation where the SDK documentation is referenced from CD-ROM, the VF documentation will be on your local disk and the SDK documentation on CD. The help collection is created with each manual recorded as being wherever it is, hard disk or CD. The upgrade, not having a copy of all of the documentation, needs to be able to find the right folder.

If you simply copy MTS.CHM into your DOC folder, you fool the upgrade into thinking that all of the manuals are there. The result is that when it goes to try to create the collection, it won't find the rest of the SDK manuals and will omit them from the collection.

If you want everything on your hard disk, copy all of the CHM files to your DOC folder and run the upgrade, so it can register them.

Mark - try this. Search your hard disk for a file called hh.dat Rename it to hh.old or something like that. Now reapply the 6.6 upgrade.

Sabalan - please report the Array Visualizer problem to vf-support@compaq.com Thanks for picking up on the collection name - I'll fix that.

Steve

[Intel_C_Intel]

Steve,
I have sent the problem report and the source code, and support reference ID is #CVF15186.