RPGDevNet

Windows 7 does have a killer app!

2009-09-28T12:52:21-07:00

by Roger Pence

In my previous post about Windows 7, I mentioned that (excepting its virtual machine capabilities), Windows 7 doesn’t have a single killer app. I forgot about something very important to Web developers: Windows 7 includes IIS 7.

II7 is the Web server that ships with Windows Server 2008. If you are using Windows Server 2008, and if you an ASP.NET Web developer, then II7 is surely a killer app for you. Microsoft just released version 1.0 of its Web Deployment Tool and while its still early in my WDT experience, I think it has lots of potential. Windows 7 provides developers the ability to replicate an enterprise server environment and test many of development and deployment scenarios.

If you’re a Web developer, be sure to add IIS 7 to the reasons you need Windows 7!

Up and running with Windows 7

2009-09-21T15:12:35-07:00

by Roger Pence

I skipped Windows Vista entirely—I was a Windows XP refugee to the very end. For me, the end came about three weeks ago.

Except for leaning over the occasional Vista user’s shoulder, I have nearly zero time logged using Vista and literally zero time logged installing it. But faced with a PC in dire need of a repaving (the registry had so many rotten entries it was actually starting to emit an odor), and the pleasant surprise of the availability of a RTM (released to manufacturing) version of Windows 7 (it’s available now to MS business partners and MSDN subscribers), I decided to be an early adopter of Windows 7. (Windows 7 will be generally available on October 22nd.)

I haven’t looked forward to a Windows upgrade with this much excitement since Windows 95. Lot of water under the bridge since then! After copious backups, I slapped the Windows 7 media into my laptop and a few clicks later the installation was underway. I opted for a clean install and expected to get (and was prepared for) a reformatted hard drive out of the deal. After about a surprisingly brisk 75 minutes, Windows 7 was installed and ready to use. My first surprise was that despite the fresh install of Windows 7, my hard drive had not been reformatted. My old Windows folder was still available having been renamed Windows.Old and my old file structure and its contents were intact. My Program Files folder did get cleared out as did my registry. What I got was what I considered to be the best of both worlds—a fresh Windows install with all of my old data intact. Granted, I did need to reinstall a slew of software, but saving the old file structure saved me some pain.

Windows 7’s UAC pokes occasionally

I’ve not had any trouble with any of my old software under Windows 7—all of the installations, and usage thereafter, have gone very smoothly. I have experienced a little grief with Windows 7’s UAC (User Account Control). This is the security feature made infamous in Vista and carried over the Windows 7. It attempts to provide a better level of security over what XP (and its forbearers) offered. Despite my everyday account being a part of the administrative group, I get nagged at odd times with a message saying that I lack the authority to do what I want to do.

The UAC makes creating DataGate public database names especially frustrating. I solved this problem by right-clicking the ASNA DB Manager and selecting “Run as administrator.” I also experience a weird ASP.NET debugging issue: debugging an ASP.NET app will not work unless I use the same technique to run Visual Studio as an administrator. Both of these issues are frustrating because the account under which I’m running these apps is an administrator. I’m still researching what the issue is here. In the meantime, I’ve turned off the UAC control—maybe someday I’ll make better friends with it.

Am I happy?

You bet. With one exception (in my opinion) Windows 7 doesn’t have a single compelling reason to recommend it, but tons of little ones. I’ll get to what appears to me to be the killer reason to move to Windows 7 in a moment. Windows 7’s File Explorer is still as boring as always, but at least now it’s functional and I’m doing just fine without the third-party Windows Explorer replacement that I used to need very badly. As far as usability, my old XP skills have bridged over quite nicely. Many things are certainly different, but not jarringly so. Nothing that a little Googling hasn’t been able to resolve.

The Task bar is dramatically improved, as is the Start menu. The Task bar is now smart enough to group multiple launches of the same app and you can drag and drop button placement to suit you. The Start menu is now a listbox—it is much easier to navigate.

Perhaps my biggest Windows 7 disappointment is that Microsoft hasn’t evolved multi-monitor support at all. It’s 2010! Even lowly sales and marketing people use multiple monitors with Windows now. Why must it be so challenging to get separate taskbars for each monitor? That’s a feature that once you’ve used it you can’t live without it. As a long-time user of MultiMon on Windows XP, I gave up on MultiMon with WIndows 7 because the notion of having the Vista capable version in beta since March of 2007 (!) doesn’t inspire confidence. I jumped to DisplayFusion Pro for Windows 7 and it works fine and solves the taskbar problem quite nicely. DisplayFusionPro is highly recommended. If you use multiple monitors, beware downloading the trial: that guarantees you’ll be spending the $20 to license it.

I also installed a copy of Norton Internet Security 2010—this is another component that seems to me should have been available out of the box. One thing that I wish that I had done before installing Windows 7 is to have used DriveImageXML to backup my old drive. DriveImageXML is a highly recommended backup facility. It lets you get good backup of all of your folders—even while the PC is running. (I’ll be using DriveImageXML soon to copy a drive image from one drive to another—watch for a post about how that goes.)

Windows 7’s killer app

What appears to be Windows 7’s killer app is its ability boot from a virtual machine. Under Windows 7 you can boot directly to a virtual machine. Sounds killer to me—you get the benefits of a virtual machine, but it exists next to the hardware without the need for a resource-hogging host. I was quite happy to realize that my Dell Latitude D820’s processor is virtual machine-capable under Windows 7. More on this as I explore the feature. Not surprisingly, to really use this feature well lots of disk space is needed. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be swapping my 120GB drive out for a 320GB drive—I’ll be dedicating much of the left-over oodles of space to a variety of virtual machine configurations. I’ll be covering Windows 7 virtualization in more depth in an upcoming post.

Windows 7 exceeds all of my expectations. It’s prettier, isn’t any slower (don’t think it’s faster, though), and has lots of interesting little built in bells and whistles. I’m counting on the virtual machine capabilities of Windows 7 to dramatically change how I use my PC. But even if that doesn’t quite live up to expectations (which are currently pretty high) I’d still rate Windows 7 is a must-have OS for Windows developers.

Roto-Rooter—System i .NET Extension

2009-09-04T13:27:53-07:00

Roto-Rooter Services unclogs its dispatch system with ASNA’s AVR and DataGate.

Read about how Roto-Rooter built a new Web services-based “service-dispatch” application and equipped its technicians with GPS-enabled mobile phones to better automate its dispatch processes.

Will You Reach The Clouds?

2009-06-30T22:45:00-07:00

You can hardly read a newspaper or technical journal these days without hearing about “the cloud” and how it is upon us. So, what does all this really mean, what is the cloud and what does it mean for you. The cloud refers to the growing presence of hosted applications, storage, and processing capabilities. It provides you and I with a great set of choices on how to best manage both our internal IT, as well as providing another way to deliver our applications to our customers (be they internal or external customers).

Firstly, let’s demystify “the cloud.” The cloud really just refers to hosted resources. So it’s not a big jump to simply replace “hosted” for “cloud” and you have a more down to earth description. (no pun intended !). So, what we are talking about is really the move from applications and resources that are local to those that are hosted, either by someone else, or by your own company. Let’s look at a few examples. Perhaps the best know and most successful cloud company is Salesforce.com. They provide a customer relationship management (CRM) product that users access via a simple web browser. No software installed, nothing to maintain. This is a huge cost savings for customers, and allows them to focus their resources on their core business. Another example would be Amazon’s “Elastic Cloud Compute (ECC).” Amazon provides users with access to hosted platforms, including disk space, operating system of choice, IP addresses and more, all charged by the hour. And you can dynamically increase or decrease resources as you need them, also by the hour. This gives you amazingly new control over your IT spend, and you are freed from all of the administrative tasks of managing this infrastructure.

There are a variety of initiatives underway from several of the major market players including Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Symantec, with Oracle set to unveil their offering shortly.

What does this have to do with you? Maybe something, maybe nothing. Some questions your company should ponder are the following:

Is our internal IT basically a commodity. We use standard technology and IT administers it?
Do we expect our IT resource needs (computers, operating systems, disk storage) to be changing over the next 24 months (either up or down)?
Would our customers benefit from an option to use our application over a simple web browner rather than having to buy and install clients?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, it is well worth looking into offerings by some of the companies mentioned above. If you answered “no” to all of these questions, you should still pay attention to the developing cloud. Why, because it is the new model of computing that is being embraced worldwide. You may not see it everywhere today, bit the infrastructure is being built out as fast as physically possible, and it is no longer a question of “if,” but “when.”

For those of us who remember the mainframe days, you may be struck by déjà vu, when you realize we have gone from centrally hosted computing severing dumb terminals, all the way back to essentially the same model. However, it is clear that what makes this go-round quite different is dramatically lower cost and faster hardware and networks, and large variety of high quality applications. The lack of these led to the initial demise of the mainframe as the predominant computing platform.

So, sit back, relax and enjoy your flight! Our trip into the cloud will be a very exciting and rewarding journey.

[photo credit: SXC]

A Paradigm Shift in ASP.NET Application Architecture

2009-06-02T20:18:00-07:00

By Tim Daniels

ASP.NET application development is undergoing a paradigm shift that will alter the architectural foundation of application design. Moving application processing from the server to the client is the simplest way to describe this change. More specifically, this means moving user interface centric processes, from the web server to the browser. This change not only affects system architects and website designers, it also changes the way developers design and create browser-based applications. Developers will have to give more consideration to architectural concerns than ever before.

At a technology level, this paradigm shift means that the current ASP.NET application model, based on postbacks and view state, is being replaced with an alternative architectural model. The new model is a combination of technologies focused on enhancing the end user experience in the browser. These technologies include; AJAX, JavaScript, jQuery and Service Oriented Architecture. For the developer, this means that server side controls will give way to AJAX and JavaScript based components running in the browser. Silverlight will also play a major role in this model. The ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern, which eliminates server side controls, also figures prominently in future web-based development.

What is driving such a dramatic shift in ASP.NET application architecture? End users are becoming more and more sophisticated; demanding more from web based applications in terms of content, work flow, graphics, animation, data access and rich interactive experiences. They are also becoming more intolerant of poor response to their requests. Regardless of network latency, architectural limitations and technological limitations, end users are demanding a more responsive web. The solution is to exploit the processing power and data caching capacity of the client, and drive as much processing and data manipulation as possible into the browser, along with reducing the payload size and number of round trips to the server.

The content for this article is based on two books I’ve been studying. Microsoft ASP.NET and AJAX: Architecting Web Applications by Dino Esposito and Developing Service-Oriented AJAX Applications on the Microsoft Platform by Daniel Larson. You will find these to be excellent references as you explore the future of ASP.NET application development. Also, although the spec isn’t yet completely feature-complete, read about what Microsoft has on tap for the upcoming ASP.NET 4.

Customers

2009-05-29T12:30:00-07:00

By Rene Rodriguez

I was recently reading Karl Seguin’s “Foundations of Programming” ebook when I came across a sentence that reminded me of my first software development consulting job, eons ago. At the time I had been going to graduate school and took a break to think about my dissertation (which I ended up not finishing, but that’s another story). I was back home, had landed a part-time teaching job at a local college, and was looking for something else to do. My brother was a consultant with several customers in town; he had written an application in Clipper for DOS (bonus points if you know what I’m talking about) which he adapted to each of his customers. So I asked my brother if there was anything I could help him with. He told me the brother of one of his customers wanted a little program about lotto combinations. “Cool!”, the mathematician in me said. So the guy told his brother what he wanted, who in turn told my brother, who told me. Yeah. I know what you are thinking and you know where this is going, but the program looked so simple I couldn’t believe the description I got was anything different from what the guy wanted.

What the customer wanted

I finished the program after a couple of days of hacking away with Turbo Pascal. I agreed to meet with my brother’s customer and his brother to deliver it. I demoed it to them and he said “that’s not what I wanted…”

“What do you mean?”

He proceeded to show me his notebook, filled with number combinations, frequencies, graphs, and more, and explaining to me what he wanted the program to do for him. After the meeting I was angry, mostly at myself for not taking the time and caution to talk directly to the guy in the first place, which brings me back to the sentence I mentioned at the beginning:

The client knew far more about his or her business than I did. Not only that, but it was their money and my job was to make them get the most out of it. As the relationship turned more collaborative and positive, not only did the end result greatly improve, but programming became fun again.

And that’s exactly what happened: we met a few times afterward, developed a great working relationship, and programming the requested changes was fun to do.

The lessons I learned, work together with your customer and respond to changes, have served me well. I haven’t encountered a software project that didn’t require customer input and changes as the project progresses. Furthermore, I found out I was empirically Agile, as these lessons are embodied in the Agile Manifesto and are core to the Agile methodologies. If you are interested in reading more, one of my favorite blogs on Agile is James Shore’s “The Art of Agile” , which advocates XP and contains very valuable bits of information on the programming craft.

Ah, the good old days

2009-05-27T16:00:00-07:00

By Eduardo Ross

It is very hard to break preconceived notions on any reality around us. As a species, we can sure get set in our ways. Being set in my ways makes it hard for me to deal with IBM's ongoing changes and transformations. In the late 80s IBM was a corporation that derived most of its revenue from hardware sales. I cut my teeth in the midrange community on that IBM business model.

Over the last several years, IBM has gone through a conscious transformation from being a hardware-based company to one based mostly on services. This transformation hasn’t been a secret. For quite a while now IBM has been telling its investors, and anyone else who would listen, that the future was in services. But for those of us who grew up with the old hardware-based IBM, the change is hard to accept because it requires us to change our mindset and perception of IBM. Perhaps making the change even harder to accept is the fact that we also must acknowledge that certain platforms that are so dear to us may no longer play a pivotal role in IBM’s future.

I was reminded of this transformation while reading Jeffrey O’Brien’s article IBM's grand plan to save the planet. O’Brien presents CEO Sam Palmisano’s strategy to put IBM’s best assets to work for IBM and for humanity. By applying the deep research capabilities within the company’s labs and the services arm built over the last decade, IBM can tackle problems that no one else can; problems such as managing a city’s vehicle traffic or tracing the flow of food from production to consumer’s tables. When IBM talks about services don’t think that it means traditional IT services engagements. IBM wants the lucrative services end of the spectrum and that means focusing on projects where there will be low competition. The bet is that IBM’s brainiac researchers give the company the edge it needs over its competitors.

It appears that shifting to services has been a great strategy for IBM and is a good use of the assets it’s accumulated over the years. However, accepting this new phase in IBM leaves one longing for the good ol’ days when the AS/400 was an important part of IBM’s formula for success.

IE8 adds a (surprisingly good) JavaScript debugger

2009-05-15T16:52:00-07:00

by Roger Pence

I can’t understand how an otherwise rational human being can eat mushrooms and, with a straight face, say they taste good. They’re fungus! They taste like dirt. They squeak on your teeth. You might as well be eating earthworms and rubber bands. But, still, some people do like mushrooms. I don’t hold that against them. In fact, some of my closest friends like mushrooms. I think they’re nuts but that doesn’t mean I will remove them from my FaceBook friends list (that’s a joke. I don’t have a FaceBook friends list).

IE: the dirt-tasting fungus of browsers

That’s also the way I feel about Internet Explorer. If you like it, if it makes you smile, that’s great. Good on you. If all I did was browse Web sites, IE might make me smile. But I use a browser as much as a developer tool as I do as a relaxation/research device. As a developer tool, IE just plain stinks. Firefox, with its add-in model, is sooooooo much better for so many reasons than IE is. Do not attempt to write (and learn) JavaScript without Firefox and its premier add-in debugger Firebug and its add-in Web developer tools. These are seriously powerful Web developer tools.

Having said that, with Internet Explorer 8 Microsoft has finally made a firm commitment to make IE developer-friendly. IE8 has Web development tools built into it. And pretty good tools at that. Previously the IE Developer Toolbar was an optional add-in for IE 6 and IE 7. While that add-in doesn’t offer JavaScript debugging, if you’re stuck with IE 6 or 7, the IE Developer Toolbar is a must-have for developers. IE8, though, emerges as the Microsoft browser of choice for developers. It’s built-in debugger (shown to the left) offers a much more seamless JavaScript debugging experience than Visual Studio does.

While the IE8 debugger lags behind FireBug in features (you can’t hover over a value for a quick watch display during execution with IE8 like you can FireBug, for example), it is surprisingly effective and helpful. It’s a bit too modal for my tastes and has a few clunky UI elements, but still, it’s a giant step forward for using IE for development purposes. IE8’s built-in developer tools is a yet another promising sign that MS is paying more attention to Web development.

In an interesting bit of related news, Opera also recently started including its own integrated developer tools. Its JavaScript debugger, while easily in third place when compared to Firefox and IE, shows promise.

The bottom line

If you are a Web developer, you absolutely have to install IE8 on your PC. Install it today before you forget! And, while I’m at, if you don’t yet use Firefox and its add-on development tools, do that today, too! They are all free and offer amazing power.

IE 8 debugger links

Fantastic new Javascript debugging tool with IE 8 and its list of features hard to live without

Falling in love with the IE8 JavaScript debugger

IE8 Script Debugger – Under the hood

Sensible debugging in IE 8

Performing File Overrides with AVR

2009-04-27T23:01:00-07:00

By Barry Milam

A frequently asked question by AVR programmers is how to perform runtime overrides (ala OVRDBF). This is a very easy operation to perform with AVR. You can override the file or its member and you can even override the entire database name. This article takes a look at both operations.

To perform overrides, both the DclDB and DclDIskFile objects have properties that can be changed at runtime. To understand how these overrides work, let’s first consider the basic code skeleton shown below in Figure 1. The code below declares a DB connection and a disk file. Notice that the file is declared with ImpOpen(*NO)—the program will need to explicitly open the file. This is an important requirement for using file overrides; you can’t perform file overrides on a file opened implicitly.

Note also that the DclDiskFile object’s File() keyword must be a literal. Remember that file overrides occur at runtime. At compile time, the library and file name provided with the File() key must be provided as a literal. By default, the program stub below expects to connect to the file CMastNewL2 in the Examples library.

Figure 1. Basic program skeleton

0001  DclDB pgmDB DBName( "*Public/DG Net Local" ) 
0002           
0003  DclDiskFile  Cust +
0004        Type( *Input  ) + 
0005        Org( *Indexed ) + 
0006        Prefix( Cust_ ) + 
0007        File( "Examples/CMastNewL2" ) +
0008        DB( pgmDB ) +
0009        ImpOpen( *No )  
0010  
0011  BegSr Form1_Load Access(*Private) +
0012                   Event(*This.Load)
0013      DclSrParm sender *Object
0014      DclSrParm e System.EventArgs
0015      
0016      Connect pgmDB 
0017      Open Cust
0018  EndSr
0019  
0020  BegSr Form1_FormClosing Access(*Private) +
0021                          Event(*This.FormClosing)
0022      DclSrParm sender Type(*Object)
0023      DclSrParm e Type(FormClosingEventArgs)
0024      
0025      Close Cust 
0026      Disconnect pgmDB
0027  EndSr

To perform a runtime file override with AVR, you provide the library and file to which you’re overriding with the DclDiskFile’s FilePath property. It’s very important to set this property before you open the file. The code below in Figure 2 shows the FilePath property being changed.

Figure 2. Overriding the library and file.

0001  BegSr Form1_Load Access(*Private) +
0002                   Event(*This.Load)
0003      DclSrParm sender *Object
0004      DclSrParm e System.EventArgs
0005      
0006      Connect pgmDB 
0007      
0008      Cust.FilePath = "Prod/Myfile"
0009      Open Cust
0010  EndSr

By default, a file is opened using its first member. If a file has multiple members, you can override the DclDiskFile’s MemberName property has shown below in Figure 3. This code changes the active member to be “SL2000” when the file is opened.

Figure 3. Overriding a file member

0001  BegSr Form1_Load Access(*Private) +
0002                   Event(*This.Load)
0003      DclSrParm sender *Object
0004      DclSrParm e System.EventArgs
0005      
0006      Connect pgmDB 
0007      
0008      Cust.MemberName = "SL2000" 
0009      Open Cust
0010  EndSr

Just like when overriding the library and file, overriding the member name, the file must be opened after you’ve set the MemberName property. You can use the FilePath and Member properties together to change both the file and its member.

You can also override the DB name. This would redirect your application to a different database name at runtime. The code below in Figure 4 shows a DB override:

0001  BegSr Form1_Load Access(*Private) +
0002                   Event(*This.Load)
0003      DclSrParm sender *Object
0004      DclSrParm e System.EventArgs
0005  
0006      pgmDB.DBName = "*Public/MyDBName"     
0007      Connect pgmDB 
0008      
0009      Open Cust
0010  EndSr

This code causes the program to connect to the database name “*Public/MyDBName.” You can (and probably would) also provide file-level overrides in this situation. If you didn’t, the program would expect to find the same libraries and files in the overridden database name as existed in the original database name.

"A Proactive Approach Is Needed to Address IBM's Legacy Solutions"

2009-04-27T15:05:04-07:00

Excerpt of an article by Greg Schottland published today on MCPress Online.

ISVs and enterprises must move forward, while leveraging their existing knowledge and investments.

The System i (formerly known as iSeries and AS/400) is a midrange platform produced by IBM. In the '90s, the AS/400 platform became one of IBM's greatest success stories. A symbiotic relationship between platforms and independent software vendors (ISVs) proved to be a critical success factor for both the platform and the application providers. The value propositions of the System i platform and the advantage over alternatives led thousands of enterprises and ISVs to develop vertical applications based on System i and to put their trust into and base their future on this environment. It was the golden age of the platform, and new vertical solutions were created one after the other.

As with other technology-based products, over time there was a decline in purchases of new System i boxes. The decline in revenue reflected the difficulty IBM had trying to sell the System i line, which in turn caused IBM to change its product strategy regarding this platform. The System i Division was reorganized into the Power Systems and Business Systems units for larger and smaller clients, respectively.