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Hi Wenfang, Here's more recent information about building netCDF for Windows: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/docs/faq.html#windows The current version, netCDF 3.6.3, builds on Windows with Cygwin, and we will try to make it build in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 sometime soon. Building on Mac OS X is much easier, it should work "out of the box" just using the simple configure, make check, make install instructions for most Unix systems. Whether you should get netCDF-3.6.3 or netCDF-4.0 depends on what you plan to do with netCDF. If you only need to read data from existing archives, netCDF-3 is probably adequate for a while, until more data providers begin making use of netCDF-4 features. If you have immediate use for some of the advanced features of netCDF-4, such as parallel I/O, multidimensional tiling, or user-defined types, then netCDF-4.0 is required. Note that if you configure and build netCDF-4.0 without the --enable-netcdf4 option, you get a netCDF-3 library, the same as you would have gotten with netCDF-3.6.3. Building netCDF-4 with its advanced features enabled is somewhat more trouble, because it requires that you first install the large HDF5 library. Soon I'll have to add an FAQ with an answer about whether to get netCDF-3 or netCDF-4 ... --Russ Russ Rew UCAR Unidata Program address@hidden http://www.unidata.ucar.edu Ticket Details =================== Ticket ID: GBN-103891 Department: Support netCDF Priority: Normal Status: Closed