RE: Free-Form vs Fixed Form.

Scott;

I would never be able to express my sentiments on WDSC as well or completly
as you have.
I committed to using WDSC sence last January, and while it has improved from
the 5. version I started on to the 6.0 version I have now it just isn't that
great. 

Thanks,
Duane Christen

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Klement [mailto:rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2006 1:52 PM
To: RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: RE: Free-Form vs Fixed Form.



> 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 editor


But 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.