If you run IBM Rational Purify (or PurifyPlus) on a machine that doesn’t have Visual Studio installed, you’re likely to be told that “Purify requires that a module from the Microsoft DIA SDK be installed”.

(Wouldn’t it be nice if it told you the name of the module?  Or if the Help button worked?  But anyway.)

The IBM article PurifyPlus requires that the Microsoft DIA SDK be installed… explains that for Visual Studio 2005 you have to run vcredist_x86.exe, but for me at least that had no effect. Neither did the instructions for Visual Studio 2008.

Having searched and discovered that the file in question is msdia80.dll, I copied msdia80.dll from my development machine into C:\windows\system32 and ran regsvr32 msdia80.dll.  Hey presto, Purify now shows my source code in its output!

Your mileage may vary of course, but perhaps it’ll work for you too.  I believe the same requirement applies to Rational Quantify and Rational PureCoverage, but I haven’t tried my fix with them – if you find that it does or doesn’t work, please leave a comment!

Incidentally, the reason I’m running Purify on a different PC from my main development PC is that it seems flaky under 64-bit Windows, even when running with a 32-bit process.  The application crashes a few seconds after starting.  On 32-bit Windows (in a virtual machine) it works like a charm.

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