FTN95 Plug-ins for Visual Studio Community

I understood that plug-ins for Visual Studio are only available for 'full' Visual Studio versions, since the express versions do not allow plug-ins. FTN95 Express 5.40 is a somewhat specific case.

What about the new package Visual Studio Community? This program substitutes –under certain conditions- the express versions, but allows plug-ins. I guess that the personal edition of FTN95 does not offer a plug-in for Visual Studio Community, but can the standard FTN95 version be used within Visual Studio Community?

Best regards, KL

We upgraded to 2013 Community edition. I then reinstalled the latest version to get the plug in. It works just fine.

Many thanks for your quick reply. Was the latest version a full FTN95 version?

Klaus

No, it was an upgrade version.

Sorry, for the misunderstanding. By 'full' FTN95 version I mean the commercial version in contrast to the FTN95 Personal Edition.

Yes, it was the full version.

Thank you very much for the valuable answer. Klaus

I think the plug-in for FTN95 PE works in VS2013 Community Edition.

It works absolutely fine. I guess that FTN95 Express 5.40 is now obsolete. Is there somewhere already a specific documentation?

Many thanks,

Klaus

Dear John-Silver,

I must admit that I am not too familiar in using the various modern software development environments. I am often using Visual Studio Express/Visual Basic for developing the windows employing the extremely powerful .NET, from which Fortran executables are called. I simply have too many Fortran subroutines, which I cannot convert to Visual Basic or C#. I have stopped using ClearWin+.

The new (and free!) Visual Studio Community package offers now the possibility to plug-in FTN95 outside the commercial Visual Studio versions. Unfortunately, the documentation is missing. I simply tried a quite normal approach. I installed Visual Studio Community and I uninstalled FTN95. Visual Studio Community is very consistent with the Express version, so there is no real problem in using it. Terrible is the large number of options for the many different languages. I then re-installed FTN95. Obviously, FTN95 checks if a 'valid' version of Visual Studio is available for the plug-in. And indeed, it detected the installed Visual Studio Community and offered to plug-in FTN95. The result is an IDE for FTN95, which in my opinion is superiour to the FTN95 Express version 5.40. This IDE is just beautiful.

Nevertheless, I am sure that many colleagues will continue working with the Plato IDE or even with a simple editor and little batch files. But my feeling is that Visual Studio with the FTN95 plug-in is a really attractive and future-proof alternative. If so, a better documentation and introduction for this IDE would be really helpful.

Best regards, Klaus

I have tried the new Community edition with FTN95 plugin and it worked. However, I wasn't very happy with all the junk that was installed with the software so I quickly removed it (despite unticking all the things I didn't want, like Silverlight, which it installed anyway!). Actually it was hard to remove properly and I had to restore an image of my HD to the point before the install.

At this time I am using VIM and the command line and my own build program, or sometimes Plato depending on my mood. This suits me fine.

'Associated junk' is always a problem. As for Silverlight, I found it downloaded as part of the Microsoft ICE Image Composition Editor, which splices digital photos together. This is a brilliant free application, works extremely well, and is worth suffering for.

Eddie

Since I work frequently with Visual Studio, I have also looked in more detail how the integrated FTN95 works. In general really good and I am sure that this IDE will find more users. I hope that the next release of FTN95 will also allow integration with Visual Studio Community 2015.

Are there any plans to revise the FTN95 plug-in? For instance making IntelliSense for Fortran available? The colorisation of Fortran key words seems to be incomplete: “.lt.”, “.and.”, “err”, “.not.”, “unit”, “.eq.”, “size” and probably also others are not colorized.

When working with “WinApp” and using “write (,)” I can see the correct output file on screen. After having looked at it, I can close it and exit. However, when using for instance Checkmate and a runtime error occurs, this output window is moved as icon to the task bar. Unfortunately, it can neither be **opened **nor closed. The only way to get rid of this window is to exit from Visual Studio.

If on the other hand I work without “WinApp”, I see my results on the screen in the command prompt window. Unfortunately, this window closes immediately with the end of the run and I cannot look to the results. Are my observations correct or am I missing something?

KL