eclipse visual-studio ide cygwin rhapsody

Running IBM Rhapsody animations without Visual Studio

I am relatively new to Rational Rhapsody, and SysML in general, so the errors are likely to be at my end.

I have been scouring Google (and SOF) looking for ways to run Rhapsody animations without Visual Studio. It was my impression that if Rhapsody had access to another IDE, say Eclipse, then the other IDE could deal with the animations. Is this correct, or is VS absolutely required to run animations and debugging tools in Rhapsody?

I have been getting a similar error to that of the user in How to fix Rational Rhapsody error :"Current value is "VC11", but no Visual Studio installation was not found in the directory ""."; my error is "VC10." However, I do not have, or plan to have, Visual Studio run the animations; I'd rather have the animations run using Eclipse, but this is not working either (the same "VC10" error occurs).

I also chatted with a contact at IBM and he suggested trying cygwin as a compiler, but under my circumstances, I cannot download that software.

Thanks in advance for the assistance.

Solution

The Rhapsody workflow:

Rhapsody generates code from your model. (UML => C++)
To compile the code you need a compiler. Rhapsody does not have its own compiler. If you are on Windows, you can use the VS or cygwin compiler. (C++ => EXE)
If you have enabled the animation instrumentation for your application, then if you start the application, it will connect (using TCP/IP) to a running Rhapsody instance. The animation will run in Rhapsody.

... is VS absolutely required to run animations and debugging tools in Rhapsody?

A compiler (eg. VS or cygwin) is absolutely required to compile the code that has been generated by Rhapsody. Rhapsody is required if you want to see animated state-charts or sequence-diagrams while your application is running.