[ADMB Users] Visual Studio with ADMB

[Arni Magnusson]

Absolutely, Marc. I'm optimistic that helpful messages about VS 
configuration will appear on the mailing list in the next few days, and 
result in a 'cookbook recipe' that will be archived and maintained on the 
ADMB Project website.

Some advanced VS users can probably tell us about their experiences with 
libraries, namespaces, etc., and add that to the recipe.

I agree with your comment on the importance of portability, ease of use, 
and support for VS users. My own efforts have indeed focused on 
portability (standard compilation scripts for all platforms and compilers) 
and ease of use (IDE with a complete and automatic installer). Bill Clark 
and Johnoel Ancheta did a great job porting ADMB to Mac OS, and now 
OpenSolaris is supported as well. Portability and standards compliance 
have been the strong suits of GCC.

Admittedly, the development core team does not include a VS expert, but I 
know the ADMB community includes a number of them, who will hopefully 
submit useful guidelines.

I'm also aware that you have tons of experience with the internals of ADMB 
(the AUTODIF libraries) and how they are used in a large model like 
MULTIFAN-CL, so I encourage you to subscribe to the user mailing list 
(http://lists.admb-project.org/mailman/listinfo/users) and participate in 
the discussions. It's especially valuable to hear from users who know ADMB 
from the bottom up and have experience with large models.

All right, VS users, let's hear your stories.

Arni



On Thu, 8 Jul 2010, Marc Labelle wrote:

> Arni,
>
> Thanks for the pointers. Problems remain: It is not running ADMB 
> templates using VC6 or later compiler versions, but finding a 'cookbook 
> recipe', on setting up the IDE ocrrectly, including statements to use 
> the latest Numerical Recipes routines (structures) and user-specified 
> numerical libraries with no conficts, converting functions that require 
> zero or unit offset matrices or ADMB specific conversion routines, 
> problems with using 1+ namespaces, and etc.
>
> In the 'old days' before Visual Studio 2005 got created and the C++ 
> Standard did not exist, it was a simple matter of specifying #including 
> "fvar.hpp", "nrutil.h", and<admodel.h>, and setting links/paths in the 
> right boxes (I went through the painfull exercise on two compilers), 
> cross your fingers and hope for the best.
>
> Things are a little more complicated now. I understand the admb-org 
> wants to promote the use ADMB claiming it can do this and that + more, 
> but the 'group' has not done enough (in my view) to make it portable and 
> user-friendly for people using different but commonly used computing 
> platforms + interfaces (not everyone uses gcc, old Borland compilers, 
> and command line interface).
>
> So as I work on the above slowly, thought you might get others involved 
> to fix big gaps.
>
> All the best.
>
> ML>
>