• What You Will Find In IBM i 7.6 TR1 and IBM i 7.5 TR7

  October 13, 2025 Alex Woodie

  It’s early October, which means leaves are changing colors, nights are getting colder, and IBM developers in southern Minnesota and elsewhere are gearing up the autumnal Technology Refreshes for the IBM i operating system.

  With last week’s announcements of TR1 for IBM i 7.6 and TR7 for IBM i 7.5, which ship November 21, IBM has committed to delivering a slew of updates and new functionality across the range of IBM i system software, from application development to administration.

  Before we get into the specific areas of IBM i, let’s cover the general enhancements it made with I/O handling. For …

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• Big Blue Boosts IBM i Support In Instana, Adds Tracing

  October 6, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that need more insight into how their hardware and software is running may want to consider IBM’s Instana software. IBM has been investing in the observability tool, which was recently updated to support traces on IBM i systems. That’s one of several upgrades IBM has made to Instana to help its IBM i customers.

  IBM acquired Instana back in November 2020 to bolster its presence in the nascent observability arena, particularly as it related to monitoring cloud-native environments (i.e., those using Kubernetes and microservices). Big Blue had just spent $34 billion to buy Red Hat and its …

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• You Can Now Get IBM Tech Support For VS Code For i

  August 11, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that were on the fence about migrating from Rational Developer for i and adopting VS Code for RPG and COBOL development just received one big reason why they should bite the bullet and make the move: the launch of a new technical support package for Code for i from IBM.

  Visual Studio Code is currently the most popular integrated development environment (IDE) on planet Earth, according to multiple measures, such as the Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey, which found Microsoft VS Code was used by 76 percent of all respondents, more than twice the usage of …

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• What Do IBM i Shops Use To Write Applications These Days?

  February 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to languages and tools for developing applications on IBM i, there are a ton of options available for customers. Thanks to the PASE runtime, a variety of open source languages and runtimes have been brought to the platform, not to mention the time-tested ILE technologies from IBM. But what do IBM i shops actually use to write new apps? For answers, we look to Fortra’s 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey results.

  Fortra recently released the results for the 11th installment of its IBM i Marketplace Survey, which is based on surveys it conducted in late 2025 …

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• Surprise! It’s 2024 Fall TR Time for IBM i

  October 9, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM announced the Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i version 7.5 and 7.4 yesterday, bringing a host of new capabilities to the proprietary operating system. As expected, the surprise update covers a range of IBM i facilities, including Db2, Navigator, ACS, PowerHA, and the development tools.

  Navigator gets several more enhancements with the new TRs, including: a new dashboard with software licensing information; Web-based administration of network facilities; support for monitoring of Java 11 and Java 17 jobs; enhancements to the Performance Data Investigator (PDI); and new options for working with audit journals, among other capabilities.

  IBM also includes the …

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• Remain Bolsters Development Options with TD/OMS

  September 18, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Remain Software recently rolled out a major upgrade to its change management software for IBM i. The big enhancements with TD/OMS 16.1 include the availability of Remain’s Web-based development framework, dubbed Octo, as well as support for the popular Web-based IDE, VS Code.

  Remain Software introduced Octo more than two years ago as a lightweight Web-based framework to unite its various IBM i offerings. Short for Open Core for Technology Orchestration, Octo was initially put forward as a way to integrate and display information from other Remain Software applications, such as TD/OMS, Gravity, API Studio, and MiWorkplace, its lightweight, Web-based …

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• Open Source IBM i Build Tool Now Supports VS Code

  July 24, 2024 Alex Woodie

  A new release of the open source iBuild tool now supports VS Code, the developer of the tool recently announced. The new release also now fully supports ILE, which is critical to the future of the IBM i platform, the iBuild creator says.

  iBuild is a free build tool that automates the task of running all of a developer’s RPG source code through the IBM compilers. It’s been in active development for about eight years and can be downloaded from sourceforge.net/projects/ibuild.

  What makes iBuild unique is that it puts instructions on how to build objects into the header of …

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• IBM Releases Db2 For i Extensions For VS Code

  October 9, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Interested in developing new ILE applications in VS Code that utilize the Db2 for i database? Then you’re in luck, because IBM recently created and released vscode-db2i, an open source database extension for Code for IBM i, the uber popular development environment that enables ILE programming in VS Code.

  It is tough to overstate the popularity of Code for IBM i, which Liam Allan created and released just over two years ago. The open source plug-in provides ILE functionality for Microsoft’s VS Code, enabling programmers to write and edit RPG, COBOL, C, and CL code in the lightweight, browser-based …

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• Rocket DevOps Now Supports VS Code

  September 25, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers who prefer to code within VS Code can now get all the goodness of automated change management and CI/CD with Rocket Software’s DevOps offering, which now supports the popular browser-based development environment, among other new features.

  VS Code, which is short for Visual Studio Code, has rocketed to popularity in the IBM i community over the past couple of years. That popularity is due in large part to Code for IBM i, the Liam Allan-developed plug-in that brings ILE language support to Microsoft’s open source IDE.

  Allan, who is known to despise IBM’s full-fledged Java-based IDE, …

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• Midrange Dynamics Hooks Change Management Into VS Code

  May 10, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Developers using VS Code to create native IBM i applications can now use Midrange Dynamics’s change management (CM) software to properly track their work. Midrange Dynamics North America (MDNA) announced at the recent POWERUp conference in Denver, Colorado. MDNA says Midrange Dynamics will also support Merlin in the future.

  Demand for VS Code is currently booming among the IBM i installed base, who have been clamoring for a speedier alternative to IBM’s sluggish fat client, Rational Developer for i (RDi), for a long time. Thanks to Liam Allan and his Code for IBM i extensions, which enables ILE languages in …

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