As many of you know, we currently include, with Intel Visual Fortran, a Fortran-only development environment based on Visual Studio 2010 Shell. While we typically refer to this as "VS2010 Shell", there are actually two pieces to this. The first is the shell (IDE) itself. The second is a collection of tools (linker, librarian, etc.) and libraries (Windows SDK libraries, MSVC libraries) needed to build Fortran applications. The shell is free, but the tools and libraries are separately licensed from Microsoft.
So now it's 2014 and many customers ask us why we haven't updated the product to include a newer version of the shell, VS2012 or even VS2013. The reason is that we've been trying to negotiate with Microsoft to allow us to provide you with all of those bits in the compiler installer. Microsoft, however, would prefer that the WIndows SDK bits be downloaded separately by the end user. This issue has delayed our ability to update the shell and it doesn't seem that it will get resolved soon.
Please give us your opinion as to whether you'd be willing to do a one-time separate download (from microsoft.com) and install of the Windows SDK if you also want to install a newer VS Shell. Microsoft makes the SDK available as both an "online install" or where you can download the installer for use on a system that isn't connected to the Internet. The minimum download size that would be needed is about 250MB. Would this be a deal-breaker for you? I note that another Fortran vendor offering VS2012 Shell already requires a separate SDK download. Note that once you install the SDK and the shell, you don't have to do it again as long as that shell version is supported.
Your thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.