ASNApalooza London: Planning for the future while preserving the past
The theme for this Palooza London is “Planning for the future while preserving the past.” Planning for the future would be much easier if we could just leave the past behind. But we can’t.
Legacy applications are a dual-edged sword. On the plus side, your business depends on them. They have been honed for years to make your unique value proposition available to your customers. Your legacy applications do indeed help propagate your business. However, that legacy application dependence also holds you back. It’s challenging to add the new features that competitive business demands require within the constraints of the old applications. Or worse, without breaking them.
This year’s ASNApalooza offers three special focuses:
- Strategic guidance for AVR Classic users
- IBM i RPG modernization
- AVR for .NET
Sessions:
A programmer’s tour of AVR for .NET and Visual Studio
ASNA Visual RPG for .NET (AVR) is a substantial step up from AVR Classic. It is capable of building more project types, thanks to Visual Studio has a substantially better IDE, and comes with many more controls. This session provides an overview of AVR’s integrated development environment, MS Visual Studio.
- A look at the powerful Visual Studio debugger
- The editor and its many features – including Intellisense and powerful search facilities
- Project types available
- Understanding the core Visual Studio windows
How data binding works in Visual RPG for .NET
Perhaps one of the biggest changes that AVR for .NET introduces is its powerful way to bind data to user interface elements. In AVR Classic, you read data and then wrote that data directly to user interface elements (such as the subfile). This method provided a very poor separation of concerns and provided hardly any opportunity to reuse the code that populated that subfile.
AVR for .NET solves this problem with superb built-in data binding. This session takes you on tour of how that data binding works and also examines exactly why the separation of concerns that it provides is a good thing. This session will show data binding examples in both Windows and browser-based applications.
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A survey of the controls included with AVR for .NET
AVR Classic had about 26 or so controls. AVR for .NET has more than 150 of them! There is a pretty high likelihood that the control on which you spent money with AVR Classic is included, out of the box, with AVR for .NET. This session provides a survey of them and shows many of the interesting things they can do. In addition to its myriad controls offered, AVR for .NET is also able to use the .NET Framework to do some of what you need controls to do in AVR Classic. This session looks at some of these techniques, too. For example, this session will look at:
- MenuStrip/ToolStrip
- GridView and DataGridView
- Splitter and Windows resizing techniques
- DateTimePicker
- Tab control
- Using .NET’s System.IO namespace to replace AVR Classic’s OSFile control
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Preserving your legacy ILE RPG with Wings and Monarch
ASNA Wings is the newest addition to ASNA’s IBM i RPG application modernization platform. ASNA Wings uses IBM’s Open Access for RPG Edition to provide browser-based alternatives to traditional green-screen display files. With Wings, all RPG logic and file IO remain hosted on the IBM i platform.
ASNA Monarch is ASNA’s IBM i RPG application modernization platform that migrates RPG/400 and ILE RPG to the .NET platform. Once an application is migrated from the IBM i to .NET, its logic executes in the .NET environment. The database for Monarch applications can be either the IBM i DB2 database or MS SQL Server.
This session provides a high-level overview for both ASNA Wings and ASNA Monarch. It shows how Wings can be an easy entry point into a possible later full application migration to .NET. with Monarch This session will also show ASNA’s new browser-based emulator and how it dramatically changes the dynamics of application modernization.
Please contact your ASNA sales representative for this presentation.
A technical look at ASNA Wings
When demoing ASNA Wings, the most frequent response we get is “I don’t believe it! How can it be that easy?” The underpinnings of Wings, that need to work in conjunction with both IBM’s Open Access for RPG Edition and Telnet, are quite complex. But most that underlying complexity is quite nicely abstracted at the Wings user level. This session peels back a few layers of the Wings onion and shows the technical detail of just how it works. Not only is seeing how Wings work very interesting, but for users modernizing 5250 displays with Wings this sessions makes many of the tips and techniques for further customizing Wings displays easier to understand.
Because Wings shares the Monarch display file import engine, most of this session applies quite nicely to ASNA Monarch as well.
Please contact your ASNA sales representative for this presentation.
How to 21st century features to browser user interfaces
This session shows what’s possible with Wings and Monarch to further customize their browser-based renders of display files. Because these techniques use off-the-shelf standard tools and techniques, many aspects of this session also apply to browser-based user interfaces in general, not necessarily just those provided by Wings and Monarch.
Among the techniques discussed in this session are:
- Adding a Google map to your browser-based applications
- Improving the user experience with Ajax
- Using ASP.NET master pages to provide the core of a great UI
- Using Visual Studio’s built in graph control to add a visual component to your pages
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Strategic guidance for AVR Classic programmers
AVR Classic first debuted nearly 18 years ago. Raise your hands if you feel old! ASNA has hundreds of customers who’ve created mission critical applications with AVR Classic. Many, if not most, of these customers are now facing the challenge of how best to move that application portfolio into the future.
This high-level session provides some strategic guidance from ASNA on how best to deal with your AVR Classic legacy code. Presented by ASNA’s Eduardo Ross, Tim Jannsen, and Roger Pence, this session covers:
- A summary of the current issues of persisting your COM-based programs into the future
- Don’t rip and replace, stabilize and surround! Rational choices probably don’t include the wholesale replacement of your existing code base.
- What UI you should target in the future? We live in a post-PC world!
- Application architecture considerations for the next generation of your applications
There aren’t magic answers to the challenges of persisting legacy code, but this session helps set the stage on how you can get to the best answers to the challenge for your business.
Interoperability between AVR Classic and AVR for .NET
Choosing between COM and .NET, or AVR Classic and AVR for .NET isn’t either/or! In our conservations with customers, we’re often quite surprised at how little is understood about the ability of AVR Classic and AVR for .NET to coexist nicely in the same application. This session details our “stabilize and surround” recommendation; where you get COM applications stable and stop making changes to them and then start building around that foundation with new .NET applications. This session will discuss some of the technical points to consider as you strive for AVR Classic and AVR for .NET interoperability. Among the topics covered with be:
- Code interoperability between AVR Classic and AVR for .NET
- Database coexistence across the two platforms
- Learning considerations to prepare you and your AVR Classic team for .NET
DataGate Studio for Visual Studio 2010
For years, AVR has included the free-standing DateGate DataBase Manager as its utility for working with DataGate databases. After years of serving us well, the old DB Manager is finally being put out to pasture. Taking its place is DataGate Studio for Visual Studio. DG Studio is tightly integrated into Visual Studio and does all the old DB Manager used to do and much more. Among the topics covered with be:
- DataGate Studio Projects
- Creating DB connections
- Creating and modifying database files
- Working with record locks and open files
ASNApalooza London is on October 20/21, 2011. Reserve a seat today. Seats are limited and we want to see you there!