Ok Folks, a little light hearted, seasonal, discussion as a result of a recent comment by one of my current colleagues.

He mentioned that he wondered why F5, to run the currently edited fex from within Dev Studio, was not available, and I must admit that it has been one of my wishes for many years (too many to be honest ).

With that discussion it got me wondering what other little things within Dev Studio would others wish for?

Perhaps, with the PMs monitoring the Forum (we know you are!!), Santa's helper - Gerry - might think that some might make excellent enhancements? Who knows .......

Happy holidays one and all .....

T

i would simply love that! to not have to leave my keyboard and navigate to the run button would make coding that little bit nicer..

its small things like this that can make all the difference imo...

so yes please i vote 'yay'

How about Gerry giving the freeware developer of Notepad++ a job to revamp DS?

How much time do you think Santa's elves are spending on improving Dev Studio? Among other things, it's achingly slow to start up and hurtfully slow to provide a list of masters when creating a new report, Run is the least of my worries. I bet you the elves are hard at work on the next Biff! Bang! Pow! Sock It To Me, JB! new feature while lonely old Dev Studio languishes in a corner.

Happy Holidays.

I have a simple, or not so simple, wish that DevStudio stop prompting me when i am developing a fex.

quote:

Originally posted by Francis Mariani:
How much time do you think Santa's elves are spending on improving Dev Studio? Among other things, it's achingly slow to start up and hurtfully slow to provide a list of masters when creating a new report, Run is the least of my worries. I bet you the elves are hard at work on the next Biff! Bang! Pow! Sock It To Me, JB! new feature while lonely old Dev Studio languishes in a corner.

Happy Holidays.

Francis, we tend to use notepad ++ as a substitute for DS as it alieviates the explorer loading issues (our DS is cripplingly slow as well)- unfortunatlely for me my machine has been reimaged and has messed with a few of my settings so im back on DS and are

but we are talking about creating a shortcut-key(something you ca create yourself in notepadd ++) so i would imagine such a simple request would not impede on any of the new features you would like-

and yes personally i'd prefer a better explorer speeds within DS over a run shortcut but the run shortcut is probably 100 times easier to implement (as one of our experts here believes the DS explorer issues to be down to memory leaks)

to not have to use your mouse when coding would be a real boon and the DS speed issue has been mentioned so many times before im not sure its even being addressed? its certainly existed since 762...

maybe if we all club together and request a new feature of reasonable DS explorer speeds?

quote:

DS explorer issues to be down to memory leaks

That's what you get when a product is based on IE components.

DS can not run unless you have IE.
IE is possibly the least efficient and slowest browser mechanism available.

Yes, DS is client software, but try installing it on a machine that does not have
IE (it's a prerequisite 6+), and Yes you can have XP and Vista without IE.

quote:

Originally posted by JG:

quote:

DS explorer issues to be down to memory leaks

That's what you get when a product is based on IE components.

DS can not run unless you have IE.
IE is possibly the least efficient and slowest browser mechanism available.

Yes, DS is client software, but try installing it on a machine that does not have
IE (it's a prerequisite 6+), and Yes you can have XP and Vista without IE.

To be honest i don't know anything about that level of programming (ie manual memory management) to say whether it would be memory leaks or not-

but what you say is interesting, firstly because yes IE is perhaps the worst browser out there but also in its relationship to DS- perhaps this explains why when you run a fex from DS IE will steal your focus and not allow you to access DS for a short time- this is not only incredibly frustating but to me unacceptble when you consider that they shouldn't be linked in that way- unless of course it was intended to work like that which sounds likely now you've said that ^^-

i must say im very surprised about this...

We all use Edit+, the two main reasons are:
1. Cost of DS
2. Speed of DS

I think if these can be addressed many people will be much happier.

Francis,

quote:

it's achingly slow to start up and hurtfully slow to provide a list of masters when creating a new report

Which is why I still use 7.1.6 DS having tried the later incarations and reverted back!

T

line numbers
just line numbers printing in my stocking, please.
'Edit w/ Associated Tool' to actually 'Edit WITH the Associated Tool' , unless of course that's a veiled reference to your human coding partner ...

Susannah, Line Numbers would be like creating the wheel, or sliced bread.

Neanderthals invented soap.
did you know that?

quote:

it's achingly slow to start up and hurtfully slow to provide a list of masters when creating a new report

I told them what the problem was with this about 6 months ago and every incremental release I live in hope... but no!

Probly they got bored and are doing the new end user interface.

What I wish is Reportcaster to be scheduled on the first business day of the month (or the second... or the last....)

I miss the little green running man!

totally miss the little green running man!

Merry Christmas everyone!

It would also be nice to have the "Multi-tab" look when you have multiple fexes open.

It is soooooo very cumbersome to navigate between multiple open components.

AMEN to the last one. I frequently (VERY) have multiple components open and am always moving, resizing, etc. or trying to find the correct component from the "Window" menu option. I the would show up as tabs, that would make me a happy camper!

i can't find search & replace, in devstu.
am i nuts?

In the text editor? Or from the Explorer window?

text editor

In the edit pulldown menu, there is find and replace.

Too much eggnog?

oops..
i meant 'Edit in Composer'...
my edit dropdown doesn't have a find/replace...
so when i have to change 'cacheruntimedata="1"' to 0, i gotta go hunt and peck.

Hi everyone,
Nice topic! Tony, thanks for starting this discussion.

We will review all your wishes and try to make them available in upcoming service packs or new releases.
I don’t want to sound defensive but in addition to adding new features, we have been working on improving the load performance of Dev Studio in the 76x release, optimize calls made by tools and we are continuously working on further product optimization, usability and functionality improvements.

I agree, Developer Studio can take a long time to load when the Projects area is used for development as the product at startup checks if the WF Environment used for Project development is online, establishes a connection, searches the available applications for the ones that contain projects (.GFA files) and then continues to build the Projects tree and highlight the last used project.
If the Projects area is not used the product should load fast as no connections are made to any of the configured WebFOCUS environments until the developer makes a selection.
We are actively working on further performance improvements that will be made available in the next SP (769) and we will continue this as we move forward with upcoming service packs, further optimize calls made by tools and improve time needed to get file lists.
We will also research the ability to use other browsers to display report output. The reason we are using IE so far is due to the available programming APIs that are made available by Microsoft that allows us to perform certain tasks we use during execution: ability to reuse existing browser session, pass parameters etc.

With regards to using more advanced editors w/ DS, we have enabled the capability of calling from Dev Studio any editor that is registered with your text files through Windows Explorer.
Adding a shortcut key to execute a request while in the editor will be in the next Service Pack.
With regards to the post by RSquared, can you please provide some more info as to what type of prompting occurs during development. Thank you.
Also it would be helpful if cases are opened for the new features and product issues as it will expedite your requests.
Nice note about the running man! Sorry you missed him

Thanks and Happy and Healthy New Year to everyone.

Regards,
Dimitri

quote:

If the Projects area is not used the product should load fast as no connections are made to any of the configured WebFOCUS environments until the developer makes a selection.

Dimitri, thanks for the followup but just to let you know we work out of Data Servers exclusively and have at current count 489 directories and it takes a long time to open the list and a really long time to create a new focexec.

i don't mind the time it takes to load...the benefit of being sure that everything syncs with MRE is huge, to me anyway. (opposite of ginny... we work in MRE, and very little on the backend)
that the properties don't travel when you copy a fex from one server to another in devstu does puzzle me a bit. (they do when you move, or copy new) I'm sure there's a reason why. its nice if you have parms turned on on a dev fex, and then copy it to the prod that it doesn't carry the parms switch...but it just seems inconsistent.
thanks Dimitris for listening to us all.

quote:

Projects area is used for development as the product at startup checks if the WF Environment used for Project development is online, establishes a connection

Thanks for replying Dimitri, a few notes:

our DS is cripplingly slow when navigating and we don't use the Project area at all.

the reason i site notepad ++ all the time is that it is freeware that works how i expect DS to work- ie navigation should be as fast as possible, creating and saving files should be fast as possible and you should be able to fire off a report to IE and then be able to return immediately to the text editor and continue working or fire anopther report- either way they should not be linked in that way - its actually embarrasing sometimes if some one is watching me go to a differnt folder or save a file in DS....

notepad ++ also has tabs which would be a major plus in DS, when Sql Server 2005 came out they introduced that into the main enterprise manager and it made it a joy to use...

one other thing i'd like to see improved is the console screen- it would be nice to have the right-click options to capitalize and add comments, and a find function would be nice -

Rome wasn't built in a day but these are pretty basic things mentioned time and time again on the forum

Dimitri,

I applaud you for responding to this post and making the statements that you have made. Surely a good PR move but if some of these niggles are ironed out then I am sure DS will be a better product for it

T

Hi susannah - if you are in the Text Editor in Developer Studio, you can display the line and column numbers in the status bar - which is controlled from the View menu.

-- Jamie