A VisIt 2.x plugin for reading SUNTANS output in native proprietary format
For the precompiled, VisIt 2.7.3 Windows binaries, you have to have a compiler compatible with MS Visual Studio 2010. There is a free MS Visual Studio 2010 Express download - hopefully that works.
When installing the VisIt binaries, choose all users, enable plugin development, and disable the TFT database reader.
xml2cmake -clobber suntans2.xml
xml2info -clobber suntans2.xml
cmake -G "Visual Studio 10 Win64"
Unfortunately, the cmake command fails, as some of the paths have spaces, and they are not properly enclosed by double quotes. Even fixing that quote problem (in PluginVsInstall.cmake), then I get an error that MS Visual Studio 2010 Express does not support 64-bit. It prints a URL for downloading the SDK necessary to compile 64-bit. After installing that, still gets a cmake error, something about an empty list? PluginVsInstall.cmake line 406. Based on visit bug 1644, this is an issue with cmake >= 2.8.12. At this point, cmake runs to completion, but devenv.exe is missing - may have to separately pull in the C++ part of the Windows SDK. Not sure where devenv.exe is, but opening the .sln file in the GUI works. Now it gets a compile error due to the updated VTK API regarding ghost cells. Hopefully that's now taken care of with some CPP directives. But regex libraries and some dll thing are undefined at the link stage. win32-regex is provided by visit.
Install a Visit binary for the platform closest to your platform. The published binaries tend to use older g++ compilers, so the best bet is often to just use executables compiled with the newest g++. You'll also need cmake. Then:
/path/to/visit/binaries/xml2info -clobber suntans2.xml
/path/to/visit/binaries/xml2cmake -clobber suntans2.xml
cmake .
make