Newsletter Page 31

Ever hear the phrase, “Don’t reinvent the wheel?” That little phrase is one of several principles that guide writing good code. Given the vast richness of the .NET Framework, I’ve learned this lesson many times over. I can’t even count how many times I’ve written what I thought was great piece of code only to show it to someone and then be told, “You know the .NET Framework provides that already, right?” Doh.

With the release of Microsoft’s Surface tablet, we’ve gotten the question several times, “Do ASNA products run on tablets?” When the question is asked, we’re not sure if the question is specifically about the MS Surface tablet or if the release of the MS Surface simply put tablets back on everyone’s radar.

ASNA US is proud to announce that Rick Barron is now the US Director of Sales and Services for ASNA. Rick Barron leads the ASNA US sales and services teams.

Wings 6.0 ships in December. This version introduces support for Visual Studio 2012 (also somewhat confusingly known as Visual Studio version 11) and one of the notable things that it features is a substantially enhanced version of ASNA’s 5250 browser-based emulator, ASNA Term. The latest version of ASNA Term provides many enhancements to make the emulator more tablet-friendly.

ASNA recently announced ASNA Mobile RPG (MR). MR is ASNA’s new product and aims to dramatically lower the learning curve for creating mobile applications for use with smartphones and tablets. After creating a mobile UI with MR’s mobile UI designer, that UI is compiled on the IBM i as a display file. An RPG programmer then writes a traditional RPG program against that display file. For compile time purposes, the RPG program uses that traditional display file; but at runtime the RPG program uses the MR-created mobile UI.