[MayTheFlowBeWithYou]

Dear CFD-Online community,

I know its been asked about a million times, but I need help to compile UFDs in Fluent.

I installed ANSYS 18.1 and Visual Studio 2017 (in that order).

The message I get when I want to make the library is as follows:

(chdir "plzwork")(chdir "win64\2ddp")'nmake' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

During my search for a solution I found mentions of some kind of Visual Studio command prompt and that launching fluent from that might fix the issue. I cannot find this thing at all.

I also found mentions of setting environment variables to fix the issue:

name: Include

value: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Include;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\atlmfc\include;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\include

Second:

name: Lib

value: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Lib\x64;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\atlmfc\lib;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\lib

Third:

name: Libpath

value: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v3.5;C:\Windo ws\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\atlmfc\lib;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\lib


Fourth:

name: Path

value: C:\Program Files\ANSYS Inc\v140\fluent\ntbin\win64;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\bin;C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v3 .5;C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727 ;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\vcpackages;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\Tools;C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin\x64;C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin

The problem with this is that C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs does not exist on my PC (along with some other paths that also don't exist).

I also found that using Visual Studio 2012 Professional could work, but I can't find anything other than 2017, its like Microsoft decided to be a d*ck and destroy all previous versions.

Can anyone please help me with this problem? I desperately need this to work.

[MayTheFlowBeWithYou]

The problem is that apparently Visual Studio 2017 Community cannot work with Fluent at all, it will never work.

I opted to get Visual Studio 2010 Professional from a "different" source (I cannot find any other way to obtain it). Now everything seems to work.

[pivalse]

There is a Knowledge Resource on the ANSYS compiler that addresses the issue.
(Resource #2049257 --> https://support.ansys.com/AnsysCusto...%20SYS/2049257)

The instruction set is quite detailed, even though it boils down to replacing the udf.bat file with a new version specifically for VS 2017 Community (the free one). The udf.bat file is used to set the ENVIRONMENT variables and tell FLUENT where to find the Visual Studio tools to compile C routines.

In my case, it required an additional tweak, since FLUENT could not find "nmake". The solution is to find the folder that contains "nmake" under "C:\Program Files (x86)\Visual Studio" (make sure to choose the correct x86 or x64 depending on your system). Copy that location into the ENVIRONMENT VARIABLE (PATH) to let the system know where to find it.

You will have to log out and log in again (or better, restart) to make that change take effect.

It worked for me.