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The productivity enhancements of code-assist and the outline view are by themselves tremendous.
Code assist is okay... I haven't found that it makes a big difference for me, as I spend enough time in RPG that I pretty much have all of the BIFs and opcodes memorized. When I do come across details that I don't remember, it's not a big deal for me to have a separate window open pointing to the Information Center (actually, I usually do anyway!)
Outline view... I've never found a practical purpose for. Other than to ooh and ahhh over what a neat feature it is... while writing a program, what do you use it for? It doesn't update as you're typing, so you have to click refresh and wait 2 minutes for a result. Once it has a result, what do you do with it? Jump from subprocedure to subprocedure? Big hairy deal!
Yes it takes a bigger PC, but I ran WDSCi at home quite happily on an old slot-A Athlon 850 with less than 1GB RAM (I think 512 or 768).
It doesn't run on my Pentium 750. It's extremely slow on my Pentium 1.7ghz w/768mb of RAM. It runs acceptably well on my 3ghz Pentium w/1gb of RAM.... but is still slower than SEU, or for that matter any other editor ever created.
Force yourself to use WDSCi for a couple of weeks. You won't go back.
WDSC is well designed and very poorly implemented. It's very buggy. It's very slow.
a) Originally, I had a lot of problems with crashes. With help from list members, I managed to get those sorted out.
b) I have problems with source members "disappearing". It doesn't happen very often, but I've had source members just seem to disappear from the iSeries. They still exist on the PC in WDSC, but when you save them, the changes only go to the PC.
c) I've had similar problems where the source members sitll exist on the iSeries, but don't get updated by WDSC when I make changes. The changes only go to the PC.
d) I'm constantly annoyed my WDSC's tendency to download all of the members in a source file. Especially since it does so very slowly. If I hit ctrl-shift-I and tell it the specific member I want to open, why on earth do I want to wait 3 minutes while it downloads a list of all of the members?
e) WDSC's support for CL programs is really awful. It works right most of the time, but frequently does something strange. Granted, it's much better for RPG than CL, but still... doesn't anyone test these things?
f) The "Find" facility in WDSC is a joke. For each member it searches, it creates a spooled file on the iSeries -- no idea why -- and it's HORRIBLY slow. I don't need thousands of spooled files created on my system (particularly since the print queue that it automatically picks for me -- without asking I might add -- is set to print automatically!). Why can't it just search the members and return the results? Why does it need to generate spooled files, then download the spooled files? I could write a better, more efficient, less irritating search function in under an hour. But apparently in version 5.1.2 (which implies lots of previous versions!) IBM hasn't been able to figure out how to write a simple program to scan members and return the results.
g) WDSC requires Windows. If you're a Mac or Linux user, give up, IBM hates you and will try to tell you that you're doing things WRONG if you're not using Windows.
h) The debugger is slow and ungainly and very complicated to use. There are better GUI debuggers included with the system! And a better green screen one, as well.
i) Although WDSC does let you have many members open at once, it takes a lot of playing around with customizing the view, closing the 180 unnecessary things that it opens automatically for you, making other things "auto-hide", etc. until you can get enough space in the view where you can actually see more than one member at a time. When you can only see one member, having more than one open isn't all that useful. With SEU I can have 4 of them open where I can see them all at once simply by using 4 different 5250 windows.
WDSC does have some nice features: a) The "Undo" key. b) The HTML editor c) The Java editorBut I definitely found that the cons outweigh the pros at this point in time. In time, IBM may improve WDSC to the point where it's a suitable replacement for SEU, but it's not one yet (IMHO)
We have a college intern here. She hates SEU with a passion. She thinks it's very unintuitive, since she's always used PC editors and the screen-at-a-time way of thinking for 5250 screens just confuses the heck out of her. So she uses WDSC exclusively -- but she doesn't like all the quirks either. In her mind it's better than SEU, but she wishes it was more stable and easier to use, like any of Microsoft's products.
iSeries Network did a blog where 5 people at KOA tried to adapt from the old PDM/SEU environment to WDSC, and wrote about their experiences. Of those 5, one ended up switching jobs and never finishing the experiment. OF those that did finish, 2 of them transitioned to WDSC, and 2 of them did not and decided to stay with the older tools.
The opinion of at least one of those who did switch was that WDSC was "still new." Meaning that there were still things in it that needed work before he'd consider it a mature product. He said that they've come a long way and that he's convinced that it's useable.
My experience with it was similar. It feels like you're testing out code that's been released to the public for beta-testing.
I just don't understand how people on these lists can jump in and say things like "once you've used it you won't go back". It just doesn't make sense... it's just not that great.
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