Documentation for FTN95 and Visual Studio

I have a slim volume from 2002 'Getting Started with FTN95 for Microsoft .NET' supplied by Salford Software when I bought a previous version of FTN95. Only 24 pages but I found it very helpful - though eventually opted to use Clearwin+ rather than .Net

Although I've updated my Fortran licence since then I haven't seen any new versions of this documentation.

I am currently installing Visual Studio 2015, and wondered if there is any update to this old documentation to cover the last 13 years development of Visual Studio, as I would very much like to try out FTN95 with VS2015 for a new project.

We no longer provide hard copy manuals. All of the documentation is provided both online via the Silverfrost website and in the released ftn95.chm help file.

Both will be more comprehensive and more up-to-date than the manual.

Many thanks. Maybe I'm just past it, but I like the convenience of having documentation on paper. Will just have to print it out! But good to hear it's being updated and extended.

There is no actual documentation about setting up FTN95 to run with VS. You should be able to install Visual Studio 2013 (we don't support 2015 yet) and then install FTN95. It will detect the presence of VS and ask if you want to install the plug-in.

Does 'don't support VS 2015 yet' mean it won't work - or just you haven't had a chance to try it yet ? I've downloaded and installed VS Community 2015 - but don't want to waste time if there's no chance that FTN95 will work with it. Not sure if I can backtrack VS and download VS 2013.

When installing FTN95 you get the option of integrating it with the different versions of Visual Studio that the installer finds on your machine but, at the moment, not for Visual Studio 2015.

There may be a way to do the integration manually if the plug-in components can be extracted from the installer and if they can be used without modification. Certainly in the early days the plug-in had to be adapted for new releases of VS.

Personally, I don't experience any problems having more that one version of VS on my machine.

I have not experienced any problems having less then one copy of VS in my machines 😃 I'd like to hear anyone sharing their experience with both versions of FTN95

The plugins won't work with VS2015 because they don't know about the settings it requires. The plugin is coming soon.

The plugins for VS in my experience were quite buggy also, frequently crashing out when trying to modify project references and source files, I ended up writing a ruby build script to read the FTN95 project files and unloaded them from the solution and added the script as a pre-build step, when I need to add references or source files I manually edit the project file as the Visual Studio plugin normally just crashes out.

The PDB files generated from the build do allow for some level of debugging however, also the syntax highlighting helps so I tend to use the plugin mainly for editing source files.