[Coin-ipopt] compiling IPOPT under MSVC 6.0 & DF 6.0

[Andreas Waechter]

Hi Rohallah,

> As i know, under native win tools, "MSVC > 7.0 + Intel For" is required to
> compile IPOPT.

This is not correct.  The current Ipopt documentation includes 
instructions on how to compile Ipopt without a Fortran compiler, using the 
f2c Fortran-to-C translator.  You can compile Ipopt using UNIX-like 
environments like Cygwin or MSys.  You can also compile Ipopt using the 
MSVC 8.0 project files that are included in the distribution.  Please have 
a look at the Ipopt documentation 
(http://www.coin-or.org/Ipopt/documentation/).

The current distribution does not contain supported Developer Stuido files 
for the Intel Fortran compiler, but it should work if you compile Ipopt in 
Cygwin or MSys, and specify F77=ifort for the configure command.

> Is it possible to compile C++ parts with MSVC 6.0 ?

I'm not aware of any code in Ipopt that would not compile with MSVC 6.0, 
at least not in the Cygwin or MSys environments.  If you wanted to use the 
developer studio, you would need to create your own project files.  For 
this, try to use follow the instruction for the 8.0 compiler version 
(http://www.coin-or.org/Ipopt/documentation/node24.html), but you probably 
won't be able to open the Ipopt.sln file at the end.  So, to create your 
own project files, you need to include the source files that are included 
in the v8 files in

Ipopt/MSVisualStudio/v8/libCoinBlas/libCoinBlas.vcproj
Ipopt/MSVisualStudio/v8/libCoinHSL/libCoinHSL.vcproj
Ipopt/MSVisualStudio/v8/libCoinLapack/libCoinLapack.vcproj
Ipopt/MSVisualStudio/v8/libIpopt/libIpopt.vcproj

If you open those files with a text editor, you can see the XML code for 
the vcproj files, and see which source files are included, and what the 
AdditionalIncludeDirectories and PreprocessorDefinitions are.

I hope this helps

Andreas