ASNA Updates Visual RPG for .NET Development Tool

by Alex Woodie

ASNA this month will start shipping the second release of its flagship product, ASNA Visual RPG for .NET, or simply AVR for .NET, a "superset" of the familiar RPG language that plugs into Microsoft's Visual Studio 2003 development environment and compiles to native .NET code. The company, based in San Antonio, also announced DataGate Component Suite for .NET, which provides .NET programmers with optimized access to DB2/400.

ASNA's tools have always provided a unique value for companies that have invested in RPG and DB2/400 and are looking to extend those investments to the Web or to new Windows clients. For years, the company's "classic" program ASNA Visual RPG (commonly referred to as AVR) gave RPG programmers a visual development environment and a relatively painless upgrade path to Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) programming architecture, by generating native Windows executable code from AVR's RPG-like syntax. When Microsoft followed up on COM with .NET and finally launched a new release of Visual Studio, ASNA followed suit and launched the long-awaited AVR for .NET 7.0 last summer (see "ASNA Set to Open Road from RPG to .NET").

On June 30, ASNA will start shipping AVR for .NET Version 7.1, the latest iteration of the development tools since last summer's launch. This release builds on the object-oriented programming capabilities of the first release of AVR for .NET, with enhanced object-oriented features such as method overloading, delegates, enhanced polymorphism, and enumerations.

Method overloading, ASNA said, lets RPG programmers create more than one version of a subroutine (or function) that is varied by the routine's parameter list, and also enables the creation of overloaded constructors. The new polymorphism enhancement lets RPG programmers create class definitions for interfaces, for which other classes provide the implementation, the company said. The new delegates feature lets RPG programmers create indirect references to subroutines for events and call backs, ASNA said, while the new enumerations feature should improve code readability. (ASNA said enumerations is somewhat like constants, "only much better.")

ASNA's president, Anne Ferguson, said she is impressed with the object-oriented work AVR for .NET users have done with the first release, and expects even more impressive work to be done with AVR for .NET 7.1. "Our first release of AVR for .NET introduced effective object-oriented programming to our RPG customers," Ferguson said. "With this new version's increased focus on object-oriented implementation, our customers will be able to architect even more powerful, more sophisticated software, with less complexity."

Other changes ASNA has made to the AVR.NET language with Version 7.1 include support for class members with the Intellisense code prompting feature, new constructs (including with/endwith and for/endfor), and the capability to lock sections of code when working with multiple execution threads. ASNA has also enhanced AVR.NET's integration with Microsoft Visual Studio, and said it has delivered better management of compiler warnings, new automatic source control integration capabilities, and a new RPG expression evaluator for Visual Studio's native debugger.

ASNA also announced the expected June 30 availability of its new DataGate Component Suite for .NET, or simply DCS for .NET, a data access library that provides any .NET-compliant language (such as VB.NET or C#) with record-level access to DB2/400. ASNA said that, in addition to providing read/write access to DB2/400 data, DCS for .NET "will also provide VB.NET/C# programmers the ability to call OS/400 program objects."

Ferguson also provided an update on the status of AVR for .NET's expected support for Microsoft's next version of the SQL Server database, codenamed "Yukon." "By this fall, we'll introduce yet another release of AVR for .NET that, despite Microsoft's Yukon delay, supports SQL Server from native RPG I/O commands, and that provides even tighter Visual Studio integration," she said.