Visual Studio Code Archives

Say Goodbye To Downtime: Update Your Database Without Taking Your Business Offline

May 5, 2025 Donna Westmoreland

Downtime is costly, impacting productivity, revenue, and customer trust. For retailers and financial institutions, even a few minutes can mean significant losses. This is why enterprises rely on IBM i Db2 for mission-critical systems. IBM i offers 99.999 percent availability, high stability, robust failover strategies, and real-time monitoring to reduce unplanned downtime.

However, planned downtime for critical updates and projects is also necessary. The challenge lies in scheduling this maintenance and upgrades without disrupting business applications. So, how can we utilize new functionality and optimize systems with minimal disruption?

Database File Updates

It is not surprising that businesses tend to …
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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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IBM i Debugger Comes to VS Code

February 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

At long last, IBM i developers can now debug their code in a development environment other than Rational Developer for IBM i or Merlin. The news came last week, when Liam Allan announced that the ILE debugging feature is now available in Code for IBM i, his third-party, IBM i-centric plug-in for Visual Studio Code.

“Debugging ILE COBOL and RPGLE inside @code like it’s any other day!” Allan tweeted from his @Notesofbarry Twitter account. “I’m pumped for this release #ibmi.”

Indeed, this day has been a long time in coming. Allan, who has not been shy about sharing his dislike …
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New Extension Brings IBM i Closer to VS Code

August 11, 2021 Alex Woodie

When it comes to integrated development environments (IDEs), Microsoft is best known for its full-featured Visual Studio offering. But many developers have grown attached to its younger, free-er, and lighter weight cousin, Visual Studio Code (VS Code). And with the new VS Code for IBM i extension recently unveiled by Liam Allan, the skinny IDE’s integration with the midrange server is getting better.

VS Code for IBM i is an open source extension that allows developers to work with IBM i languages like RPG, COBOL, and CL within VS Code. Allan first released the product in February, but largely kept …
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RDi On Mac Users Are In For A Big Sur-prise

August 2, 2021 Alex Woodie

IBM i developers who run Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi) on macOS are running into trouble getting the IDE to run on the latest release of macOS Big Sur, version 11.5. However, with patience and perseverance, IBM i developers are finding ways to get it to run. An official fix from IBM has yet to be made.

Reports of problems getting RDi 9.6 to run on Big Sur emerged in June, when users began to post reports on IBM i chat boards, including the new IBM Community site. Users reported problems installing RDi on Big Sur, as well as …
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ILEditor2: Satisfying The Need For Development Speed

April 28, 2021 Alex Woodie

Liam Allan doesn’t like anything to slow him down. “I’m impatient,” says the young IBM i phenom. So when he’s writing RPG or COBOL, the code editor had best keep up with him. That’s a problem using something like Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi), which Allan doesn’t particularly care for. And that is one of the primary reasons why Allan developed ILEditor, which is now in its second incarnation as ILEditor 2.

Just over a year ago, Allan and his business partner, Connor Holyday, shipped the first release of ILEditor 2. The pair had just completed an extensive …
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Say Goodbye To Downtime: Update Your Database Without Taking Your Business Offline

Database File Updates

Rocket DevOps Now Supports VS Code

IBM i Debugger Comes to VS Code

New Extension Brings IBM i Closer to VS Code

RDi On Mac Users Are In For A Big Sur-prise

ILEditor2: Satisfying The Need For Development Speed

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search