Using RSE

[J.Pluta]

Bill, I'm sure you knew you'd get a reply from me <grin>. But let me ask a couple of questions first. What version of WDSC are you running, and on what machine? You say you're willing to spend money for a tool, well, the tool required for WDSC is a fast PC. For the green screen aspects of WDSC you need about 768KB of RAM, a CPU around 2GHz and at the very least a 7200RPM disk drive. The disk drive is very important; old laptops with 4200RPM drives really have problems. And it's crucial that you have the latest version. Version 6.0.1 is light years ahead of 5.1.2 in terms of stability and speed. Okay, if you've got all that, then here's my response: 1. The scroll wheel works great! In fact, it's the reason I've learned to use the scroll bar. 2. I hvae a wide screen monitor, and I can easily fit three source members side-by-side-by-side showing 45 lines of code or so per member. 3. The Outline view can save your butt when working on a large program. Being able to click on a variable and see every place in the program that it's used is awesome, and then click on that to bring up the exact line in the source is even cooler. 4. The search capabilities are incredible. I tell it to search on a field name in all the source files in a library, and I get a complete list of those matches - it actually shows the matching lines so I get some context. Then I double clikc on the match and the member comes up. Show me THAT in PDM/SEU! 5. I can have two views of the same member open for edit at the same time. This is great when I'm making changes to procedures and their prototypes. 6. The service entry point debugger is the coolest thing I have seen in the last 15 or 20 years, without a doubt. Set a breakpoint and any time that user calls that program (batch, interactive, whatever), the system suspends the job and returns control to my debugger. Simply awesome, especially for web development. I can go on and on, Bill, really I can. I live with WDSC every day and I love it. There are shortcomings. It's not as fast as SEU, which gets the benefits of 5250 display and local files. There is no SDA equivalent (one is coming); for now you have CODE/400. Not only that, but eventually you'll have to use WDSC, because PDM and SEU are getting no development dollars. WDSC is the future of System i development, and if you give it a chance, it's a good future. Joe

[Terry Winchester]

WOW...you echo my sentiments exactly. IMO, the whole WDSC/RSE toolset as an SEU replacement is still "beta"...I gave up on it months ago. When they get it stabilized (without having to download a gig of updates) AND when it starts as fast as SEU then I may look at it again. I hope your wearing flame retardent material today...lol Terry

[David Abramowitz]

Unfortunately I agree. I too, had to give up on using WDSC. Albeit my client was unable to provide a PC with enough power to make the thing work properly. You really need at least a gig of RAM. I have been told that IBM is working on efficiencies that will alleviate this situation, but so far. . . . . . . . Dave

[J.Pluta]

Terry, WDSC will NEVER start as fast as SEU. But that's a little bit of a red herring, because unlike green screen where you have to keep getting in and out of SEU, you I start it once in the morning and run it all day. Heck, I've had a single WDSC session up for a week! A lot of this is a function of your PC. On a regular PC, it takes 20-30 seconds to start. On my workstation (a behemoth, to be sure, but like Bill I'm willing to spend the money) it takes 5-6 seconds. Still not as fast as SEU (nor will it ever be), but it does sooooooo much more! Joe

[J.Pluta]

1GB of memory costs about $100. I don't know what to tell you. Joe

[bibarnes@yahoo.com]

We are at 6.01 and I have 1.25GB of ram a 7200rpm drive and the processor is 2.39 GHz and a dual wide screen display (2 AL2016W screens). That said I will respond to your responses 1. Scroll wheel works in LPEX but not Code400 2. answered above 3. What is an outline view? 4. We haven't used the search capabilities 5. Not sure what you are getting at 6. Haven't yet figured out how to do that either. I know that you have a course on how to use this new tool and I don't doubt that it is well written and informative. My problem is with IBM and the fact that someone had to write a course to explain how to use this new tool. Their on-line course is the pits it pushes WebSphere and we ain't going there by a directive from on high regardless of how hard IBM pushes. What will happen first is that they will hire a bunch of VB.NET programmers and rewrite all the RPG into .NET and let us dinasours go. To me it's not that terrible since I am almost at retirement anyway but my cohort in crime still has 12 years to go. The bottom line is that I have not been successful in convincing my boss to get your course and he is trying to muddle through the IBM course to see if he can earn how to use this and then teach us. If Linoma integrates their RPGTOOLBOX into RSE I will probably try it again. That is the biggest timesaver in coding we have. I am the first to admit that part of the problem is ignorance, but I learned SEU,SDA and RLU on my own and became proficient in a few weeks of T&E. it has been months with RSE and other than making the pharmacy happy because I need more BP medicine it has provided no benefits at all other than being PC. I have never been PC and am too old to start now :-)

[Terry Winchester]

I use PDM exclusively and editing a source member by entering "2" seems real quick & easy to me :) Sorry Joe, I should have included the fact that I'm a COBOL'er. I suspect these new tools are better for RPG'ers or web developers. BTW, we bought WDSC Step by Step but the new WDSC release (6.0) came out before we had the time to begin studying your book. I never made it past the first 30 pages or so because there were too many differences between WDSC versions. Someday, I'll open the book again and give it another try... Terry

[Guest.Visitor]

Bill Barnes wrote: > I am the > first to admit that part of the problem is ignorance, but I learned > SEU,SDA and RLU on my own and became proficient in a few weeks of > T&E. it has been months with RSE and other than making the pharmacy > happy because I need more BP medicine it has provided no benefits at > all other than being PC. I'm astonished. I had a day or two of growing pains with the editor and am very comfortable with it. I'll bounce between SEU and RSE depending upon how extensive the coding task is because I don't leave RSE up all day since I'm not a full-time coder. I only do coding in RSE, nothing else and feel I am quite productive in it. If someone came to me and said I had to choose one or the other, I'd choose RSE. SEU is just too slow when there's extensive coding to be done. Did you know that you can use the SEU line commands you're comfortable with inside RSE? Just shift-tab from position 1 and it'll jump to the sequence numbers and let you enter the commands that you're used to. To jump out of the seqence numbers, just hit tab. Bill

[J.Pluta]

"BTW, we bought WDSC Step by Step but the new WDSC release (6.0) came out before we had the time to begin studying your book. I never made it past the first 30 pages or so because there were too many differences between WDSC versions." Really? I didn't think that was the case. Version 5.1.2 (which the book was written for) and version 6.0 were very similar from a functional standpoint. I'm going to go back through the book in my copious free time and see just what the differences are. That could help in a second edition. Joe

[J.Pluta]

BTW, the issue about COBOL is well taken. COBOL doesn't get quite the same treatment as RPG. You think that's bad, the DDS editor is not a lot more functional than a colorized text editor. Still, check out the Outline view. It's a helpful little feature (though not nearly as nice as the RPG version). All of the multiple view and cut and paste capabilities exist, and sometimes just the colorized text can help. Joe

[bibarnes@yahoo.com]

We are at 6.01 and I have 1.25GB of ram a 7200rpm drive and the processor is 2.39 GHz and a dual wide screen display (2 AL2016W screens). That said I will respond to your responses 1. Scroll wheel works in LPEX but not Code400 2. answered above 3. What is an outline view? 4. We haven't used the search capabilities 5. Not sure what you are getting at 6. Haven't yet figured out how to do that either. I know that you have a course on how to use this new tool and I don't doubt that it is well written and informative. My problem is with IBM and the fact that someone had to write a course to explain how to use this new tool. Their on-line course is the pits it pushes WebSphere and we ain't going there by a directive from on high regardless of how hard IBM pushes. What will happen first is that they will hire a bunch of VB.NET programmers and rewrite all the RPG into .NET and let us dinasours go. To me it's not that terrible since I am almost at retirement anyway but my cohort in crime still has 12 years to go. The bottom line is that I have not been successful in convincing my boss to get your course and he is trying to muddle through the IBM course to see if he can earn how to use this and then teach us. If Linoma integrates their RPGTOOLBOX into RSE I will probably try it again. That is the biggest timesaver in coding we have. I am the first to admit that part of the problem is ignorance, but I learned SEU,SDA and RLU on my own and became proficient in a few weeks of T&E. it has been months with RSE and other than making the pharmacy happy because I need more BP medicine it has provided no benefits at all other than being PC. I have never been PC and am too old to start now :-)

[David Abramowitz]

I have no issue with the cost of RAM, but the attitude was that they just received an entire shipment of IBM PCs with 256mb of RAM, and that was going to be it...Enterprise wide...No exceptions. Doesn't matter at this point as I'm no longer there. I did give it a try, playing with the toys that I had, and as much as I wanted to pick it up and add it to my skill set, it was just too cumbersome. An interesting aside, is that .NET installed just fine, and ran just fine within the confines of the limitations. That may have nothing to do with topic,,,,,or then again it might! Dave

[J.Pluta]

All I can say is that it's worth it for me, and for lots of other people who use it. I'm not sure what you consider cumbersome, but frankly from a development standpoint I find it much LESS cumbersome than SEU and PDM. I shudder when I have to go to SEU now and I can't just double-click on a field name and then right-click and find next. Not having an outline view is very annoying. Not being able to just right-click on a /COPY member to open it is a pain in the keister. Add to that the ability to group members into filters and filter pools and the search capabilities and... Well, if you're more productive in SEU and PDM, then you should by all means continue on that way. But I personally am far more productive with WDSC. Joe

[Guest.Visitor]

Greetings all, I'm a bit confused because WDSCi (or RAD or whatever it's called now) is so much more than just the LPEX editor. It's a complete IDE, for editing source code for many programming languages, compiling debugging, navigating file systems, etc. Having said that, I think the LPEX editor is awesome. You just have to understand that 20+ years of SEU memory muscle is faster than retraining your fingers in LPEX. You WILL be less production in LPEX for about a month but then your productivity in LPEX / RSE will blow the doors off of SEU/PDM. Where's the repeatitive undo / redo in SEU? Where's the one button compile in SEU? Where's the one button "click on the compile error / go directly that statement in source code" in SEU? Where is the prototyping wizard in SEU? How do you view lines by date range in SEU? How do you quickly just view just all structure in SEU? (IF/DOx/BEGSR/etc). Two clicks in LPEX. Or view an outline of the source code? Or quickly open a /COPY member? How do you view more source lines and more columns in SEU? (27 x 132? - you must have young eyes!). How do you transpose two words in SEU? (IE: converting MOVEs to free form without the EVAL). For me, it's just CTRL-BACKSPACE in LPEX. And RSE wins because it remembers. It remembers that last 10 or so members you've edited. To reopen one, just point and click. It remembers how you like this member to be compiled. It remembers the break points you set the last time you debugged this program. You can view variable contents in debug by just hovering the mouse over the field. The iSeries search feature displays *ALL* the found source lines from members in a view *AND* the members can be opened with a click or two. PDM can't do that. You can tell RSE that the next time user SOMEONE runs program UTILITY on the system, put it into debug for me (Imagine a Java servlet connecting to your iSeries and calling an RPG program). I could go on....but it's getting late! Regards, Chris

[bibarnes@yahoo.com]

I welcome all the comments, and I am duly impressed with the "value" of RSE. The question remains, how? Like I said before, the tool is not intuitive. Why did IBM produce a tool that needed someone like Joe to write a book on how to use it? Why not make it so that the average programmer can pick it up and run with it. I have been at this programming game for a long long long time. I go back to drum memory and when core (torroidal core) was measured in words (16 bits) and 4k was a lot of memory and 5MB disk drives weighed 80 lbs. I have coded machine language, assembler, COBOL, Fortran, PL1, Basic, dBase, FoxBase and FoxPro and , of course, RPG. I have always been willing and eager to try new things, but always with an eye to being able to write better programs for whom ever it was I was writing them for. RSE was exciting when I saw it, but it became more and more confusing as I went along. It is "almost there", it is 1/2 way between a windows app and a 5250 app. I have not been able to figure out how to make it do what y'all have bragged about. I resent the fact that it is confusing enough that Joe had to write a course on it. I may be being unreasonable since we bought a course on embedded SQL. We will probably buy the course and I will take a Saturday and learn how to use the silly thing and will probably like it. The problem has been those pesky little deadlines imposed by those pesky users. Since it is those pesky users who provide me with the tasks that keep me gainfully employed I must comply with the pesky deadlines. Joe - I figured you would probably weigh in and I am going to forward your and eveyone else's responses up the food chain and see if we can't go ahead and purchase your course. Again, thanks all for your responses. Bill Barnes Sr Analyst/Programmer The Pantry, Inc

[Jeff Crosby]

Joe Pluta wrote: > just double-click on a field name and then right-click and find next I did not know that! I'm going to have to do some more double-clicking. The richness of WDSC is both it's blessing and it's curse at times, isn't it? So many ways to do things. -- Jeff Crosby Dilgard Frozen Foods, Inc. P.O. Box 13369 Ft. Wayne, IN 46868-3369 260-422-7531 The opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily the opinion of my company. Unless I say so.

[Guest.Visitor]

Hi Bill B, Is SEU intuitive? For example, in SEU, how do you copy a block of code to another location in the source code? It's easy in the LPEX editor because it's a PC editor. Just use standard copy/paste. But if you want, you can still use CC, B, A in the sequence numbers and pretend LPEX is SEU. Most things in RSE are accessible from the menus, or right clicks. You just have to kick the tires, take it for a drive. Regards, Chris

[J.Pluta]

That's true. I guess that's why there's a market for the educational stuff I do.

[J.Pluta]

Bill, I can understand your resentment about the tool not being immediately intuitive. Heck, I still learn new things every day and I am sometimes flummoxed when I learn them (why in the WORLD did they do it that way?). But we live in an increasingly complex society; that's why an entire market has grown up around the "for Dummies" titles. Joe (as he prints out the online paper "Kerberos for Morons")

[Steve.Kiferd]

I really like the tool. My two issues are 1) the PC I use at my current client is a PIII with 128M of ram. 2) I cant hook up my own laptop to their network to use WDSc. This seems typical of most clients my company works with. So for now I am stuck using SEU and SDA. I had used WDSc at a prior client for about a year and really like it. Having a large widescreen monitor or two up displayes would be great with the tool. I would be happy getting to get a hand me down so I can get back to using the tool.

[J.Pluta]

Steve, I upgraded to a widescreen (1680x1050) specifically so I could use get three source members up simultaneously in WDSC. I am indeed a twisted puppy... <grin>

[nandelin]

I started getting into WDSC a few months ago when our development team decided to switch all at once to /free format RPG. WDSC has a nice little utility to convert RPG source members to /free format. After working in /free for a couple months, returning to source members that have CALLP and EVAL OPCODES feels a bit odd, perhaps dated. /free feels more streamlined to me, now. But I still haven't made the transition to WDSC. I rely on iSeries Access for many menu and command line operations which I use daily, and it's just to easy to go into PDM and SEU. The default runtime environment on my PC includes MS Office, Macromedia Dreamweaver, SmartFTP (I transfer a lot of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files between my PC and the IFS), iSeries Access, Firefox, Skype (Internet phone & instant messaging), and Adobe Acrobat. When I add WDSC to the mix, my desktop just seems crowded. Just this morning, my PC locked up. I had to switch the power off. And why is it that anything written in Java seems to feel HEAVY, in comparison to desktop applications written in C? Even ones using a native windowing toolkit like WDSC? Nathan.

[J.Pluta]

"The default runtime environment on my PC includes MS Office, Macromedia Dreamweaver, SmartFTP (I transfer a lot of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files between my PC and the IFS), iSeries Access, Firefox, Skype (Internet phone & instant messaging), and Adobe Acrobat." I don't use Dreamweaver, I find it too intrusive. I use WDSC. I also don't use FTP to transfer files, I use mapped drives or Remote Systems Explorer. I have my workload split; I do authoring on one machine and development on another, so Office and Publisher and Acrobat are all on the authoring machine, while WDSC and iSeries Access and Tomcat and SQL Server and Python and whatever else I'm running all run on the development box, and I never have a problem. As to heavy, I guess it's all in your perception. I find WDSC pretty darned easy to use compared to other things. Even command line things; if it doesn't have a display file, I can run it from WDSC. Joe

[Guest.Visitor]

Joe, "I don't use Dreamweaver, I find it too intrusive." What do you mean by intrusive with regards to Dreamweaver? Thanks. Tom.

[J.Pluta]

Dreamweaver really likes to insert its own formatting and calls to the Macromedia JavaScript functions. WDSC is a lot less intrusive that way. Also, the three views (source, design and preview) make it really to design code and the CSS designer is outstanding. Not to mention the fact that I can put a breakpoint in my JSP and also in my servlet and also in the called RPG program and debug them all in the same tool. Joe

[bibarnes@yahoo.com]

I welcome all the comments, and I am duly impressed with the "value" of RSE. The question remains, how? Like I said before, the tool is not intuitive. Why did IBM produce a tool that needed someone like Joe to write a book on how to use it? Why not make it so that the average programmer can pick it up and run with it. I have been at this programming game for a long long long time. I go back to drum memory and when core (torroidal core) was measured in words (16 bits) and 4k was a lot of memory and 5MB disk drives weighed 80 lbs. I have coded machine language, assembler, COBOL, Fortran, PL1, Basic, dBase, FoxBase and FoxPro and , of course, RPG. I have always been willing and eager to try new things, but always with an eye to being able to write better programs for whom ever it was I was writing them for. RSE was exciting when I saw it, but it became more and more confusing as I went along. It is "almost there", it is 1/2 way between a windows app and a 5250 app. I have not been able to figure out how to make it do what y'all have bragged about. I resent the fact that it is confusing enough that Joe had to write a course on it. I may be being unreasonable since we bought a course on embedded SQL. We will probably buy the course and I will take a Saturday and learn how to use the silly thing and will probably like it. The problem has been those pesky little deadlines imposed by those pesky users. Since it is those pesky users who provide me with the tasks that keep me gainfully employed I must comply with the pesky deadlines. Joe - I figured you would probably weigh in and I am going to forward your and eveyone else's responses up the food chain and see if we can't go ahead and purchase your course. Again, thanks all for your responses. Bill Barnes Sr Analyst/Programmer The Pantry, Inc

[Guest.Visitor]

Check out free tutorials here: http://www.modernrpgiv.com/. You will find a link to "getting started" WSDCi tutorials on the right. I sympathize with your learning frustrations. WDSC is a feature rich (read complicated) environment and there is a learning curve. Only a couple of developers in my shop have mastered it and it is hard to get management to understand that is is much more productive. Sam

[Guest.Visitor]

trying d/ling a copy of NVU (www.nvu.com). Absolutely totalling free (I think it's open source), generates extremely clean code, and the user interface is great. Ftp: try the opensource package FileZilla. We ended up switching to it because it simply worked better than most of the commercial products we'd licensed. filezilla.sourceforge.net

[JonFParis]

"... the tool is not intuitive" And you think SEU is? SEU and PDM are "intuitive" only because we have become used to them. When I first came to SEU I thought it was the most horrible editor (other than EDLIN) that I had ever worked with. Previously I had used Wang and HP editors as well as mainframe editors with their abundance of Rexx macros. SEU seemed primitive and painful - when CODE came out and I no longer needed to use SEU I leapt at it. I was working for IBM when PDM came out - I still recall the screams of "it's too hard to use" "non-intuitive" and my personal favorite "The S/38 programmer's menu is so much more usable". I never received any training in the intial WDSC releases - I figured it out fairly easily and if I recall correctly, my only real problem in the early days (other than stability and speed) was getting used to the fact that "subsystem" in the RSE tree view didn't mean what I thought it did! I now run it on a fairly slow laptop with 1G or memory - it loads "fast enough" (i.e. about a minute) and I keep it loaded all day once it is loaded. I have had very few problems with V6 - I think it has crashed once on me in the last 6 months or so - and that is more than I can say for most of my Windows apps. Frankly I cannot imagine trying to code without WDSC (or at least CODE which I still use from time to time). COBOL support is not as good as RPG - but the filtering capabilities, outline view, code snippets, multiple sources open at a time, etc. etc. make it so much more usable than SEU. To paraphrase Charlton Heston "You'll have to prise WDSC from my cold dead fingers" Jon P.

[JonFParis]

"1) the PC I use at my current client is a PIII with 128M of ram. " You could try and see if CODE will load - not as good as WDSC but better than SEU. You really need 256Mb but more on that later. "2) I cant hook up my own laptop to their network to use WDSc." Suggestions. a) Have your own laptop on your desk with source loaded in WDSC. Use the help system etc. For a complex set of changes consider copying the source onto a USB drive and loading it on your PC to use WDSC's filtering tools. b) Ask your manager/supervisor why he wants to pay you to be less efficient than you could be. Seriously - after I suggested this to a few people a coupel wrote me back and told me that it had worked! In one case they upgraded the office PC. In the other they found a way for him to connect his own laptop. Don't perhaps say it quite a sbluntly as I did - but get the message across. c) Ask them if you can buy your own 256Mb (or 512 if it will take it) of memory (small $ and tax deductible) and stick it in the office PC. Sometimes the fact that you consider it important enough to be worth paying out yourself is enough to trigger them to rethink. d) When all else fails - consider that asking forgiveness if easier than asking permission };-) Jon P

[Guest.Visitor]

I am now in the drivers seat because other things happened. However when I first joined the present comany, I tried all of the above and it failed. a) I can not bring personal laptops or even jump drives to office. Even if I was allowed, office security does not recognize personal laptops and would not connect. b) They have the budget to hire a smarter programmer who can work with existing equipment. However they dont have budget for upgrades. So if I am less efficient because of the existing equipment, then they will have to find someone else. c) I can not use my own funds to upgrade the office computer. Actually I am not suppose to even open the computer. The tech support people will upgrade only if they have the work order. d) I had already overused this option within the first few days of joining the company! Anyway, things happened like my showing some WSDC gimmicks on the small PC and promised fireworks on a 2 gig machine. (Joe Pluta's step by step came in hand). He shuffled the funds and I got a gig extra to make it 1.5 gig.

[bibarnes@yahoo.com]

I tried that with an SQLRPGLE source and it really screwed up my embedded SQL. Then when I tried to undo it it messed it up even more. I restored the source member and went back to SEU and used my RPGTOOLBOX to convert to Free and it did just fine. A lot of what has been mentioned here has been taken to heart. Since we have had RPGTOOLBOX for quite a while and have been able to offer input on its evolution it has certainly done the job for us. I can color code with a simple 2 letter command, comment out or back in entire blocks of code. Open copybooks with a simple VCB command place my cursor over a field and press F7 and up pops the field attributes or kllist attributes. We will move to RSE because it is better to do it now when we have both than to be forced later and have nothing to fall back on. My fervent hope is that Linoma will make the RPGTOOLBOX available in RSE. No I do not work for Linoma nor do I get any kickbacks from them. I just happen to use two of their products and like both of them.

[Guest.Visitor]

Should we go into the amount of time required to update this product? My PC spent an entire afternoon obtaining and applying interim fix 6.0.1.2. Steve

[Steve.Kiferd]

Jon, I have been down the road of most of what you have suggested. As far as (d) I asked permission coming in and it was shot down. My bad. Most client connectivity issues with my laptop are due to their Sarbanes Oxley procedures. I dont even have admin rights on the PC I use at the client. The MS Lan group have them locked down pretty tight. Of course if you work in that group you can play video, movies and games without issue. Thanks, Steve

[Guest.Visitor]

I learned RPG before it had II or III or IV after the acronymn. But who cares? Every generation of hardware and software requires you to invest a little time and patience and money in learning to use it and then learn to use it properly. PDM is dead. Get over it. WDSC is an exceptional development tool and while maybe it ain't perfect, it's improving with every release. The benefits more than outweigh the learning curve so embrace it with some enthusiasm. If you don't have the time to learn the product on your own, there's a wealth of education material out there, a lot of it free. If you must bitch about the product, do it from a position of knowledge to the development team in the Toronto lab so they can keep improving the product.

[Ronald Deems]

I have recently started working on a Java project as well as iSeries projects. What I like about WDSc is that you can find shareware plug-ins to help you. We use MKS for our source change management. There plug in was a life saver as it interfaced with the compile option. I do not need to have RSC manage my library list as the MKS compile option determines the library list for the project. Quantum DB has a plug in that allows you to have an SQL perspective open. I use that to query tables I am working on, or query the system table to see field definitions etc. We also use X-Analysis, and guess what, they too have a plug in. These all help in the productivity. I see it as part of being in the software business, you must learn try things out and move forward.

[DEBHARINNR]

Joe, I can't figure out an easy way to copy an rpg source from 1 library to another. Similar to using a 3 in pdm to copy from 1 library to another. I can open the member and save as, initiating an addpfm. Any other solutions? Thanks, Harry

[Guest.Visitor]

harryw wrote: > Joe, I can't figure out an easy way to copy an rpg source from 1 > library to another. Similar to using a 3 in pdm to copy from 1 > library to another. I can open the member and save as, initiating an > addpfm. Any other solutions? According to the help text, it's as simple as you'd expect: "You can drag and drop files not only between libraries and objects on the iSeries server, but between different other kinds of servers as well, such as Linux, UNIX, or Windows. Additionally, you can drag and drop items within one view, for example, in the Remote Systems view, or between views, for example, from the Remote Systems view to the iSeries Table view. When you drag and drop items, you copy, rather than move, the item that you move. If you want to remove an item completely and put it in another location, drag and drop the item first, and then delete the item from the original location. To drag and drop items: 1.. In the Remote Systems view, expand your connection(s) until you see the item you want to copy and the location where you want to paste the item. Or, open two views that contain the item and the destination. 2.. Click the item once to select it, hold down the left mouse button while you drag the item to the desired location, and then release the button. Note: The drag and drop action only supports files, objects, members, and filters; you cannot drag and drop libraries. You can drag and drop filters from one subsystem or filter pool to another. However, if you drag a filter into another filter, the target filter is updated with filter strings from the first filter, to combine them." But, when I tried it, I received error RSEG1270E saying that it was an invalid copy attempt with no explanation as to why it was invalid. Bill

[Guest.Visitor]

I also have version 6.0 and your book was about 5.1.2. However first I, then my colleges were able to follow the book with a little guess work e.g. the option was not where the book said, however it was somewhere else on the screen and it wasn't difficult to locate it. I understand it is pointless from your view point to bring a new book every year when the version changes, and it is pointless buying the same book every year. Maybe you and us should wait for a real big change.

[Guest.Visitor]

Yes Terry is a very much Cobol guy and an old timer. Terry and I are Cobol Forum Pros on Systeminetwork where you visit regularly. What the heck, maybe you dont even remember me from there, just here. Ray Harris used to be my buddy before. Maybe you remember him. However he has resigned and I had to push Terry in as I dont do a whole lot of cobol these days.

[DEBHARINNR]

Bill, every time I try to drag a member, as soon as I start to move it, I get a circle with a slash through it. Same result no matter which filter I select a member from. I've tried rpg, cl, dds from test library to test library, no luck. I can only drag a source member to the right to edit it. I've even created test production libraries under my profile, so there shouldn't be any authority issues. Thanks, Harry

[Terry Winchester]

LOL...Hassan, if I recall correctly, you also tried to push me into getting married...lol (just kidding). On another note related to WDSC/RSE editing, will these pc-based tools automatically recover source code changes in the event of the application (or Windows) hanging and/or crashing? In the past, we have lost a router/switch which caused a loss of our telnet connection to the system. Luckily, PDM has an auto-recovery mode in case that occurs :) It has saved my bacon more than once, but I have yet to see a windows-based application provided that level of recovery. Terry

[Guest.Visitor]

Right click on the source member (I do this in the Table View if that matters), select COPY, navigate to the source PF in the Remote Systems View, right click on that, select PASTE. It will ask you to change/confirm the "TO" member name. This is how I do it anyway. Chris

[bibarnes@yahoo.com]

I have been using it now for 3 days and it has crashed 3 times. Well not so much crashed as locked everything up so I couldn't even get to the toolbar. I have 1Gb of Memory and a 2+Ghz processor with a 7200RPM drive. I am assuming that it is written in JAVA and that explains teh hoggy nature of it.

[bibarnes@yahoo.com]

Be careful converting to FREE if you have embedded SQL. It not only tries to convert teh SQL to free but you can't undo it either. If you really want a tool to convert to FREE try Linoma's RPGTOOLBOX. I have converted a dozen or so programs to FREE using their tool and they have all converted cleanly.

[Guest.Visitor]

Actually the beauty of WDSC is that you can also revert the changes you have made, something SEU does not have, maybe a workaround. The other thing I like about it that I can save my source on my jump drive like I would save a word document. There is lots of cobol in this shop but we never have problem, plus they are back-back-end and nobody asks for improvements. So my Cobol is badly rusted but hey, last week I solved a problem for someone. Well I was not sure that was the case until, surpise surprise, Barbara Morris of RPG compiler team, and very unlike candidate for cobol solutions, came in and verified my solution. So let us get to the point, have you gotten married yet?

[J.Pluta]

Are you running anything else? How much disk space do you have? What's your network connection? What were you doing when it locked up? I run WDSC all day every day, and I haven't locked the machine up except for the time I tried to look at the configuration from the About menu (that takes a LOOOONG time). Finally, have you called IBM? Have you presented the problem to the WDSCI-L mailing list? There are lots and lots of people using the tool out there. Joe

[bibarnes@yahoo.com]

Be careful relying on the WDSC UnDo. If it has to do with SQL it will try and really mess up your SQL statements. I speak from bitter experience. Before anyone asks I am at the very latest revision on all that has to do with WDSC.

[bibarnes@yahoo.com]

I have a 40Gb drive with 15.3Gb free. I had 2 green screens, Outlook, iSeries Nav and WDSC open. That shouldn't be a problem as far as I can see.

[Guest.Visitor]

Bill Barnes wrote: > I have a 40Gb drive with 15.3Gb free. I had 2 green screens, Outlook, > iSeries Nav and WDSC open. That shouldn't be a problem as far as I > can see. And: have you downloaded all of the current updates? Easily done via the Help/Software Updates/New Updates option. Bill

[J.Pluta]

What exactly were you doing when it locked up? How long did you wait for it to unlock? Was network traffic occurring while it was locked up (sometimes it takes a long time to, for example, resolve a list of members)? Are you on a LAN? Direct connect or VPN from home? More importantly, have you tried to contact IBM or the WDSCI-L mailing list? As I said, lots and lots of people (more every day) use WDSC. If you give us enough information, we may be able to help. If you actually do lock up, you can cancel the job using Task Manager; this will typically give a dump which you can send to IBM. There may be a configuration error or something bad on your machine. I don't know anybody else seeing the issues you're seeing. Joe

[bibarnes@yahoo.com]

I(we) have done a course on WDSC. I can see the potential, but it has a very long way to go before it can replace PDM. Where is the create screen or create print file function in WDSC? When compiling a SQLRPGLE source with WDSC it creates a RPGLE module that displays when you click on the error. I didn't realize that at first and couldn't understand why my changes had not been made. The question is, why did it create a new source module? I will grant that it is a start, pitiful as it may be. If you do not have deadlines to meet it is fine, but I live in the real world and do have deadlines to meet. Another failing grade can be given to the convert function. If you try and convert an entire SQLRPG program to free it messes up at teh sql statements and you can't recover without restoring the source from backup. I spent over a day and a half trying to fix and compile a fairly simple program using WDSC and gave up and went back to PDM and it took me about 1 hour to accomplish that same task. This hoopy-doo debug facility that is supposed to let you start debug when someone else starts the program may be really neat, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do that. I haven't been able to figure out how to debug an interactive program using this wonderful new tool. With all the bells and whistles it is reported to have it has left out the simple and mundane tasks of the everyday world. I will continue to plug away at this thing, but I don't hold out much hope that it will be useful before I retire in 3 years. RLU hasn't changed since it first came out and should have been changed. As far as sending something in to Toronto, unfortunately there is no indication, that I could find, of where to send in complaints and/or suggestions. The course we purchased did move us along further than where we were, but didn't take things far enough. It's kind of like having a twin engine turbo-prop airplane but only have been trained in single engine fixed gear. If you try to fly it you will get hurt.

[R.Daugherty]

Hi Bill, I used it exclusively for a major project last year, but I created screens and print files the same way I do in PDM, by copying and editing in SEU. And I don't need a debugger for my own code. If you are working with several source files, and for all the other reasons given here in this thread, it's major league. But SEU and the occasional STRDBG is better for me because I just use it as a convulated SEU. rd

[J.Pluta]

Bill, I'm going to reply here because this is the same laundry list you sent me in email. First off, WDSC currenlty has no SDA replacement. Use CODE Designer, a nice GUI DDS editor that comes with WDSC. On to your specific issues: A. When I compile SQLRPGLE programs, everything works and the errors show up fine. B. Convert1ng SQL to free-form is indeed broken when you try to convert the whole source member. You have to convert the individual SQL statements. As to "can't recover without restoring source", just don't save the source. If you don't like the results of the conversion, just hit Ctrl-Z and it will undo it. C. Debugging with SEP: Right click on the program in RSE and select Debug (Service Entry). D. Debug an interactive program: Right click on the program in RSE and Select Debug As/Interactive. You will have to have started an interactive session and run the STRRSESVR command, giving it the name of the Connection in WDSC. Bonus question: Line splitting can be done via Alt-S, although you won't like that either because it splits it moves the split line to the beginning of the next line, which RPG doesn't like. Go to www.midrange.com and join the WDSCI-L mailing list. The IBM developers frequent that list and are very willing to work with people having problems. Joe

[bibarnes@yahoo.com]

I would like some feedback from anyone out there who is pushing RSE as the end-all to beat-all. I can see that it is a start but a slow one at best. It does not support the scroll wheel, nor does it support placing the cursor on a particular line and hitting page down and having that line go to the top of the page. It is sloooooow to load, it is a resource hog and if you don't constantly save your work you can lose everything when (not if) it locks up. So far I have found it to be cumbersome and non-intuitive. What I can do using SEU in 10 minutes can take an hour using RSE. I am not adverse to new tools, but I do expect the new tool to give me more advantages than pain in it's use. An analogy - I recently bought a nail gun the disadvantage is expense, the need for a compressor and the nails are more expensive than boxed nails. The advantages , I never have a bent nail, I can do more things by myself like holding up a board and nailing it at the same time and speed, I can nail down deck boards in 1/4 the time it takes with a traditional hammer. IMHO the nail gun advantages outweigh the disadvantages. RSE hasn't done that for me. I still have not figured out how to create a screen with RSE. We own RPGTOOLBOX from Linoma and use the snippet function extensively, now there is a time saver. RSE is a toddler trying to make it's way in an adult world, someday it will grow up and be useful. For now it is something I break out every once in a while to see if I can make a go of it and then put it back in its box and go back to the "old" way. I have deadlines and RSE makes me miss them. My boss doesn't care about new he cares about results. OK, now I am ready for the barrage from any or all of you that think the current iteration of RSE beats SEU, SDA and RLU.