SYNERGY-E-NEWS
News and Updates for Synergy/DE Developers

April 20, 2012

 

Synergy DevPartner Conference: Early bird discount ends today

Register today


Free code for Synergy developers

Calling C routines from Synergy and vice versa on OpenVMS


Quiz

Synergy/DE pros, see if you can answer this question

 

 

Liberated development

Synergy .NET for the budget-conscious


Synergy/DE tech tip

SELinux can prevent access to libraries used by Synergy/DE



Platform News

Read a selection of recent articles

twitter.com/synergyde
 


Synergy DevPartner Conference: Early bird discount ends today

Register today

The Synergy DevPartner Conference is the annual not-to-be-missed event for Synergy developers. Join us May 22-24 in Chicago, Illinois, or June 12-14 in York, England, for three action-packed days filled with enlightening technical sessions, extensive hands-on workshops, and valuable networking opportunities. You will leave the conference with the skills and knowledge to immediately extend your Synergy/DE-based applications with the latest technologies.

Register before midnight today, April 20, to obtain the special early bird rate.




Liberated development

Synergy .NET for the budget-conscious
By Tod Phillips, Synergy/DE Account Manager and Synergy Development Moonlighter

Ever since moving across the building here at Synergex, and leaping from PSG Consultant (development side) to Account Manager (sales side), I’ve harbored a secret: I love FREE stuff.

 

A deep-seated love of FREE isn’t something that gets you hired in a sales role, and it’s certainly not the sort of thing on which to build an entire business model. More often than not, FREE will eventually mean only that you’re FREE to pursue other careers, other activities, and other (less material) lifestyles. I’ve had to work hard to limit my use of the word FREE without attaching caveats, footnotes, or asterisks.

 

Today, things have changed. I have now been given the opportunity to tell you about a couple of FREE tools you can use with your Synergy development: the Visual Studio 2010 Integrated Shell and Synergy Language Integration (SLI) for Visual Studio.

 

When Synergy/DE 9.3 shipped at the end of 2009, a new product was added to the suite of tools. SLI, available for FREE download, allowed you to develop your Synergy applications from within the Visual Studio IDE. However, one of the requirements to use it was Visual Studio 2010 Professional (or better). You couldn’t install SLI on one of the free “Express” flavors of Visual Studio, which only give you support for a specific language and contain a reduced feature set. This posed a barrier for some Synergex customers who might otherwise have been interested in trying out Synergy .NET, but found that it would require the outright purchase of Visual Studio before they could even play with the idea of a .NET version of some (or all) of their application.

 

Quite recently, I was eavesdropping on the developers as they took a break near the Jolt Cola fridge on the other side of the building (now and then, I stand around in the shadows nearby to get my Development Fix). This particular skulking exercise paid off big, and I learned of a little-known, free distribution of Visual Studio called the Integrated Shell. I raced back to my desk, and punched in the search on Google. From Microsoft’s description of the product:

The Visual Studio integrated shell includes the integrated development environment (IDE), debugger, and source control integration. No programming language is included. Although the integrated shell does not include programming languages, it does provide a framework that allows you to add programming languages.

“Hey!” I would have said had anyone been around, “WE have a language that their framework already supports!” Before you could say “FREE” a thousand times fast, I’d downloaded the Integrated Shell and SLI, and had installed both without a hitch.

 

The real test came later that evening at home when I opened up Visual Studio and tried to create a new project. I chose a Synergy Windows Forms project to start —yes, it was right there for me to select—and voila! I was off to the races, putting Synergy code behind button clicks, analyzing the strings put into text boxes, creating ArrayLists of ISAM records and pushing them into DataGridViews. I even ported an older application that I had, which creates dummy data for a contacts database, and got it up and running in .NET with little effort and no code changes. Three hours after beginning, and with the clock inching closer and closer to 1:30am, I decided my race was over and it was time to hit the sack.

 

As I laid my head back on the pillow, I rued the fact that in a few short hours my alarm would be blaring. I tried to figure out what had possessed me to spend three hours playing with a product I already knew how to use, doing things I already knew how to do, and typing code I already knew how to type. I was going to pay for this tomorrow…

 

And that’s when the answer (and the irony) hit me: I would be paying tomorrow because I simply love FREE a little too much, and can’t resist the enticement of getting to play with a product for no other reason than it was FREE.

 

I also immediately knew that I had to share this discovery with others. If you’re anything like me, then I *highly* recommend that you give it a shot yourself; there’s nothing quite as cool as watching an old green screen application come to life with a brand new GUI.

 

We recently ran our full product tests with the Integrated Shell to verify that all works well. We found a couple limitations that you may run into: 1) the Visual Studio Toolbox does not display some third-party controls; and 2) ClickOnce deployment is not supported. So, eventually you’ll want to get the full version of Visual Studio. There’s a lot more that you can do when you have access to premium features. In the meantime, this is a great option to get started for free. You can download the FREE Visual Studio Integrated Shell here, and you can get your hands on the SLI installer in the Synergy/DE Resource Center. You’ll also need a Windows version of Synergy/DE, but if you’re a Synergy DevPartner that’s not a problem either.

 

If you’re not a DevPartner, and therefore don’t have access to the Resource Center or Windows downloads, then Synergex has something special just for you. Since you’ve taken the time to read this far, we will reward you for it: Call your Synergy/DE account manager before the end of April, and we’ll give you a Windows version of Synergy/DE (plus the SLI plug-in) to try out for the next 6 months, absolutely FREE.

What do you have to lose but a bit of sleep?

See our website for more information about Synergy .NET. 
See Microsoft’s website for more information about Visual Studio 2010 Integrated Shell.

 




Free code for Synergy developers

Calling C routines from Synergy and vice versa on OpenVMS

Like a picture, an example is worth a thousand words, and this one is no exception. If you’d like to see a simple demonstration of how to call C routines from Synergy (as well as the reverse) on OpenVMS, check out the c_pgm_calling_dbl_pgm entry in CodeExchange. The well-commented routines will show you everything you need to know.

 

For more information and the code, see CodeExchange. CodeExchange is available in the Synergy/DE Resource Center to supported Synergy/DE customers. Be sure to take advantage of this great resource, and don't forget to submit your own CodeExchange entries so that other Synergy developers can benefit from your cool code.


Synergy/DE tech tip

SELinux can prevent access to libraries used by Synergy/DE

If a Synergy/DE component doesn't work for a new Synergy/DE installation on Linux, it may be that Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is preventing access to a shared library. SELinux is a Linux feature that supports access control security policies, which can prevent access to shared libraries needed by various Synergy/DE components. For example, if you have a new Connectivity Series installation on Linux and get the following error when you attempt to use xfODBC, SELinux settings could be the cause:

USER LOGIN

ERROR [S1000] [TOD][ODBC Driver]DLLLOAD:GDS0,/synergex/9.1.5b/connect/GDS0.so: cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied ERROR [01000] [Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] The driver doesn't support the version of ODBC behavior that the application requested (see SQLSetEnvAttr)


You can solve this by setting the SELINUX environment variable to OFF, which turns off SELinux for the environment. However, if you want to use access control security policies, instead set the SELinux context of the shared library from a regular file (file_t) to a shared library that requires text relocation (textrel_shlib_t). So, for example, if the issue is with GDS0.so (as in the example above) and the system is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5+, you would use a command like the following to set the shared library to

textrel_shlib_t:


# chcon -t textrel_shlib_t /yourPathToSynergyDE/connect/GDS0.so


Check with your system administrator for the command line you should use.

Quiz

Synergy/DE pros, see if you can answer this question!

If id and row are both integers, what is displayed on the first visible row of the window named "X" at the end of the following code snippet?
w_proc(WP_CREATE, id, "X", 20, 10, WP_PLACE, id, 1, 1)
for row from 1 thru 100
     w_disp(id, WD_POS, row, 1, %string(row)) 
w_area(id,  WA_SET, 20, 1, 5, 10) 
w_updt 

 

a."1"
b. "16"
c. "20"
d. "100"
e. a runtime error occurs

Click to find the answer


Platform News

Windows