Home / Products / IRIS Explorer / Technical FAQs - PC (Windows NT Family)

IRIS Explorer - PC (Windows) Frequently Asked Technical Questions

This document is designed for users of IRIS Explorer with PC (Windows)-specific questions. For more general questions, or those that apply to another platform, please select one of the links provided in the right side box.

Questions

Answers

1. How do I set up IRIS Explorer to work with the Visual Studio C/C++ compiler? [Top]
   
   The Windows version of IRIS Explorer 5.0 was designed to use the Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 or compatible compiler for building users' modules and for compiling groups of modules. (For building Fortran-based modules, Visual Fortran 6.0 or compatible is also required.) IRIS Explorer uses the following method to check whether its local environment variables have been set appropriately:
   
   
   1. It checks to see if nmake is in the PATH. If so, it assumes the PATH, INCLUDE and LIB environment variables are already set up correctly.
   2. If it didn't find nmake in the PATH, it checks to see if the "Visual C++ directory" setting within IRIS Explorer is set. If not, it pops up a dialog box asking the user to set it.
   3. Once this has been done, it searches all directories below the "Visual C++ directory", and adds all directories called "bin" to PATH, all directories called "include" to INCLUDE and all directories called "lib" to LIB environment variables respectively. (Note that IRIS Explorer 5.0 expects the PATH, INCLUDE and LIB environment variables to already be set to something.)
   The "Visual C++ directory" setting can be set via the Configuration | Advanced menu in the IRIS Explorer Map Editor. If problems are still encountered, try setting the PATH, INCLUDE and LIB environment variables to the values resulting from running the VCVARS32.BAT batch file, which can be found in the bin directory containing the C/C++ compiler (CL.EXE). With Visual Studio .NET 2003, you can open up a command prompt from the Visual Studio .NET Tools | Visual Studio .NET 2003 Command Prompt item on the Start Menu (which will have the PATH, INCLUDE and LIB variables set appropriately) and try running the IRIS Explorer Module Builder (mbuilder.exe) from within this command prompt.
   
   Please ask your nearest IRIS Explorer Centre if you have any questions about this note.