In this issue....

REV11 licensing
Synergy/DE product roadmap
2020 DevPartner Conference agenda
Presenting in Synergy/DE 11.1.1: Select.Where.Like
Harmony Core office hours
Functional testing for Synergy web services with ASP.NET Core
and more

Synergex customers transition to REV11 licensing

Synergy/DE licensing gets an upgrade

Since REV11 licensing was released last October 1 (for Windows and Unix), Synergex customers have been steadily moving to this new revision of Synergy licensing. It comes with Synergy/DE 11, and it’s also available for systems running Synergy/DE 9.3 – v10.3. Synergy DevPartner (development) licenses require REV11 licensing; be sure to download and install Synergy/DE 11 or the REV11 licensing upgrade package before your next DevPartner renewal. See this blog post for more information and this REV11 Licensing Quick Start Guide for steps to using REV11 licensing.

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What’s up next for Synergy/DE?

We’ve updated the Synergy/DE Product Roadmap on our website. Our current focus areas for development and research are

Developer productivity
Web services
.NET Core
DevOps infrastructure
Cloud licensing

This year we’re planning a minor release before the May conference that will include enhancements to ISAM resiliency, Visual Studio, Harmony Core, and other areas; other enhancements are planned for later in 2020. The roadmap also includes features we’re considering for future.

View Roadmap

What’s on our agenda?

Join us May 18-22 in Sacramento, CA, at the 2020 Synergy DevPartner Conference for three days of informative sessions and demos (including some special guests, like UX expert Billy Hollis of Next Version Systems), one day of in-depth workshops, and one day of fun with Synergex employees and other Synergy developers. We're also introducing different subject matter tracks for Tuesday afternoon's sessions: choose between the Executive Track and the Technical Track.

View agenda

Register

Presenting in Synergy/DE 11.1.1: Select.Where.Like — You Should Like This

By Phillip Bratt, Developer Support Engineer

If you aren’t familiar with the Select class in Synergy, where have you been? We’ve been harping on about this thing, like, forever. It’s a wonderful feature in the language for reading data in a SQL-like way. Well, the Select class now has even more functionality with the addition of the Like statement, allowing you to filter your alpha results based on a matching pattern. It’s similar to Where.Contains in that you can do the equivalent of Where.Contains with Where.Like, plus so much more. A Where.Contains is a Where.Like that has a “%” sign in the front and back, telling it to search the results for that string of characters anywhere in the field.

Harmony Core office hours

Join Harmony Core product manager, Jeff Greene, as he discusses upcoming features and troubleshoots ongoing development issues. This is a great opportunity to get your specific implementation questions answered by our experts! If you are considering whether Harmony Core is the right solution for your applications, drop in for a bit to hear how others are using this open-source framework to extend their Synergy applications.

Join us on these dates:

Wed, Mar 4, 2020 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM PST
Thu, Apr 23, 2020 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM PDT

Sign up now

Functional testing for Synergy web services with ASP.NET Core

By Jeff Greene, Principal Software Engineer

Until recently, web developers had two basic options for backend testing: unit tests and integration tests. Starting with ASP.NET Core 2.1, Microsoft introduced another testing mechanism, functional testing, which gives you most of the benefits of integration testing, while taking significantly less effort and resulting in tests that are much more reliable.

Need software development consulting?

Our Professional Services team of experts can help with everything from the generic (system assessments, documentation, staff augmentation) to the specific (Visual Studio migration, building RESTful web services, data replication).

Let us help you achieve your development goals.

Learn more

Thank you for completing our customer survey!

Your valuable feedback is helping us improve our products and services so that we can help you be more successful. Here are some things we learned:

Respondents’ biggest business challenges are insufficient personnel resources (retention, aging, hiring challenges), increased competition, and creating new business models (to respond to evolving industries and technologies).
The biggest challenges with their Synergy solutions are weak UI/UX, accessibility (access from anywhere, e.g., mobile devices), and security.
69% of respondents keep the OSs that run their businesses current with vendor security updates, and only 50% keep the applications that run their businesses current.
Many customers are moving to, or interested in, Visual Studio and Harmony Core. (We’re continuing to invest in these technologies and plan more education on them.)
The most common requests were for more code samples, more videos/webinars, more product information, and more help moving to new technologies.

Tech Tip

How to upgrade a system with a backup license server to REV11 licensing

Following this sequence will ensure that licensing is not interrupted when you upgrade to version 11 or install the REV11 licensing upgrade package.

If both your primary license server and backup license server are running version 10.3.3c or earlier, you should first upgrade the primary to version 11 (or the REV11 licensing upgrade package) and then the backup.

If your backup license server is running 10.3.3d through 10.3.3g, you must do the following:

1. If the backup license server is running 10.3.3d through 10.3.3f, first upgrade it to 10.3.3g.

2. Apply the 10.3.3g hotfix to the backup server.

3. Upgrade the primary server to version 11 (or the REV11 licensing upgrade package).

4. Upgrade the backup server to version 11 (or the REV11 licensing upgrade package).

5. If the backup license server belongs to a Windows domain, open the Synergy Configuration Program and reselect the "Be a backup server" option in the Advanced dialog of the Licensing tab. (Backup license server names are fully qualified DNS names as of version 11; this will enable the primary server to recognize the "new" name of its backup server.)

Fun Fact

It's estimated that only about 8% of the world’s currency is physical money; the rest only exists on computers.

Industry News & Articles

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