Jon and Cheryl provided a good description of how to move from Compaq
Fortran to Visual Studio 2005 with Intel Fortran.  This should help many
avoid the pain of the move, except for the pain of actually paying for the
new software.

To help ease the pain, I want to report that there are benefits to the move.
Intel Fortran with Visual Studio does a better job of detecting errors, such
as error bounds, and allowing you to step through the debugger and view
values.  I caught a number of lingering errors in the various Fortran models
that I use when I made the switch.

For debugging, I turn on the following diagnostics: "warn for undeclared
symbols", "warn for unused variables", and "warn when truncating source
code".  I turn on all of the run-time checks.  For both debug and release, I
also change the Floating-Point Exception Handling from "Produce NaN, signed
infinites, ..." to "Underflow give 0.0; Abort on other ...".  This causes
the model to crash where the error happens rather than crashing later away
from the real problem.

I also recommend using Microsoft Visual Source Safe with Visual Studio.  It
helps with group development and is also helpful in letting you keep track
and undo changes.

For those of you on the bleeding edge of technology, Intel Fortran does not
currently work with Visual Studio 2008.

Happy Holidays!

Barry

-------------------------
Barry Jacobson, Ph.D., P.E.
Vice President
Soil & Water Engineering Technology, Inc.
3448 NW 12th Ave.
Gainesville, FL 32605
www.swet.com
352-378-7372 (voice)
352-378-7472 (fax)
-------------------------

-----Original Message-----
From: DSSAT - Crop Models and Applications [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Automatic digest processor
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2007 12:10 AM
To: Recipients of DSSAT digests
Subject: DSSAT Digest - 12 Dec 2007 to 20 Dec 2007 (#2007-90)

There is one message totalling 45 lines in this issue.

Topics of the day:

  1. Intel Fortran and MS Vista

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Date:    Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:20:13 -0500
From:    "Lizaso,Jon I" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Intel Fortran and MS Vista

Dear DSSATers,
Cheryl Porter and myself just resolved a problem that took a lot of time
and frustration. Hope this will save you some inconvenient.

The problem has to do with the MS Vista operating system and our popular
Compaq Visual Fortran. There seems to be issues of compatibility. Compaq
VF does not have support any longer and the recommendation is to migrate
to Intel Fortran. Intel Fortran is compatible w/ MS Visual Studio 2005.
Well, kind of. You first need to install at least a couple of Service
Packages, and then install Intel Fortran. No, you are not done yet. To
get the thing up and running properly, Intel recommends that you run
Visual Studio 2005 with Administrator privileges (right click the icon
and select Run as administrator). I thought that was it. Poor me. No,
that was not it.

In Compaq Fortran, local variables are saved by default. In Intel
Fortran, they are not. You initialize a local variable, leave the
routine, and when you return the variable has a different value, and
your program is producing garbage.

To fix this, in your Visual Studio menu go to Project and click on your
Project-name properties. On your left-hand side navigate to
Configuration Properties, Fortran, Data. Click on Local Variable
Storage, and select All variables SAVE. Apply, save and recompile the
whole thing.

Hope this may be helpful to someone around.=20
Cheers,

Jon I. Lizaso
Agricultural & Biological Engineering
University of Florida
PO Box 110570
Gainesville, FL 32611-0570
(352) 392 1864 Ext 298

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End of DSSAT Digest - 12 Dec 2007 to 20 Dec 2007 (#2007-90)
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