“D” is for Developer

Development of your traditional Synergy code in Microsoft’s Visual Studio was introduced at the DevPartner conference back in 2016. Using an integrated development environment (IDE) like Visual Studio not only promotes better code development practices and team development but shows prospective new hires that your tooling is the latest and greatest.

The next release of Synergy—10.3.3d—includes all the capabilities now required to fully develop and build your traditional Synergy–based applications in Visual Studio. During a recent engagement I worked with a team of developers to migrate their existing Synergy Workbench development to Visual Studio with great results. Although there are a few steps to complete, the results of developing in Visual Studio more than outweigh the effort taken to get there. And if you think developing in Synergy Workbench is great and productive, just wait until you are using Visual Studio—there will be no turning back! Here are the high-level steps you can take to get your traditional Synergy development to Visual Studio.

First place to start is the Synergy Repository. We all have (or should have) one. Synergy now provides a Repository project that will allow you to build your repository files from one or multiple schema files. If you have multiple schema files you can use the new pre-build capability to run your existing command scripts to create the single, ordered schema file or load the repository your way—simple. So why have the Repository project? Because you can load all your individual schema files into it, and if any change, your repository will be rebuilt automatically.

Next create your library projects. These are either executable (recommended) or object libraries. Ensure you reference the Repository project using “Add Reference…”. You no longer define the Repository environment variables “RPSMFIL” and “RPSTFIL”. This step ensures that if your Repository project is rebuilt, any projects referencing it will be as well. Next add the source files for the routines that make up your library, and build. You may have a few build issues to resolve—the 10.3.3d compiler is a little stricter, and unresolved references will need to be resolved. Any environment variables required to build your software should be set in the project common properties page or if they are library specific in the project environment page.

Finally, your main line programs. Create the required project with single or multiple main line programs. The multiple main line project allows you to have all the programs in one place, and you can easily specify the program to run.

Now you can build and run your traditional Synergy code from Visual studio—and even better, you can debug through the code using the powerful Visual Studio debugger.

Using UI Toolkit? Keep a look out for a future blog post showing how to easily incorporate window script file builds into your development process.

Building for UNIX? Not a problem. A future post will show the simple steps to target the UNIX platform from within Visual Studio.

We are here to help! Synergex can help with every aspect of getting your traditional Synergy development environment inside Visual Studio. Just ask your account manager or contact me directly.