Howdy all!
We recently (Summer of 2010) refactored the core building of the netCDF
library. Unfortunately this hopelessly broke the existing port to
Microsoft Visual Studio. Resources permitting, the development of a new
Visual Studio port will be undertaken in the second half of 2010 at
Unidata. Until then, no Visual Studio port of the latest version of the
library is available.
Users are advised that the netCDF build is known to work with Cygwin,
the free POSIX layer for Windows. Building netCDF with Cygwin, and
including the netCDF, HDF5, zlib, and Cygwin DLLs, will allow you to
access the netCDF C library on Windows, even from Visual Studio builds.
We understand that Windows users are most comfortable with a Visual
Studio build, and we intend to provide one.
The Visual Studio port is complicated by the following factors:
* No configure script support on windows - the Unix build system
uses a configure script to determine details of the build platform
and allow the user to specify settings. Windows has no mechanism
for this other than statically set properties. A Wndows-only
config.h file needs to be created for windows using Cygwin, then
included with the distribution. Since this contains the version
string, it must be updated "by hand" before each release.
* No m4 on windows - the Unix build uses the macro language m4 to
generate some of the C code in the netCDF library (for example,
libsrc/putget.c). M4 must be run under Cygwin to generate these
files, and then they must be statically added to the windows
distribution. Each new version of netCDF these files should be
checked for changes. We are restricting new use of m4 for netCDF
compiles, but that doesn't help with the existing files.
* No user options on Windows - since Windows does not support a
configure step, all user options must be pre-set in the Visual
Studio property lists. As a simplification, many options available
to Unix users will be unavailable to builders on Windows, such as
--disable-dap, --disable-netcdf-4, and --disable-shared.
* Large files (> 2 GB) have proved to be a problem area in past
Windows builds.
* Previous Windows ports have not had to deal with the new opendap
client.
Unidata is a community supported organization, and we welcome
collaboration with users who would like to assist with the windows
port. Users should be sure to start with the netCDF daily snapshot, not
a previous release of netCDF.
NOTE: User Viet Eitner has contributed a port of 4.1.1 to Visual Studio,
including an F90 port to Intel Fortran. Download source
(ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/netcdf/contrib/win32/netcdf-4.1.1-win32-src.zip)
or binary
(ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/netcdf/contrib/win32/netcdf-4.1.1-win32-bin.zip)
versions. This port was done before the code was refactored in 4.1.2.
Thanks,
Ed
--
Ed Hartnett -- ed@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
