Release Notes
ASNA Wings®
Version: 9.0.101.0
Release date: 2021-10-20


Important notices

If you are upgrading from an earlier version of Wings, you may be effected by the changes to the ASNA Runtime (see ASNA Runtime Changes below).

Wings 9.x works with Microsoft® Visual Studio 2017® Version 15.3 and up. Starting with VS 2017, Microsoft has discontinued the Integrated/Isolated shells. For many ASNA customers, Microsoft's Action Pack is a good way to purchase Visual Studio.

Be sure to read about the IBM i System Value requirements below.

What's New for Wings 9.x

Secure Socket Layer Integration ASNA DataGate 15.0 includes integrated support for SSL, allowing smoother, more effective security solutions for your Wings applications. If both DataGate Client and DataGate Server 15.0 are installed, SSL will be used by default. (See DataGate SLL Integration)

Improved DSPATR Support The handling of Display Attributes has been greatly improved, with DSPATR: UL, RI, and HI supported.

Spooled File Viewer. ASNA has introduced a new Spooled File Viewer that allows users to view spooled files either as a list or in .pdf form.

New and/or Improved Controls

Expanded Keyword Support

Software Requirements

Before installing WDA, please ensure the Windows machine is equipped with the following:

On the IBM i, you will need the following:

Supported Web browsers, smartphones, and tablets

Please see this asna.com article for ASNA's browser and mobile client support.

Installation Notes

Only one installation of Visual RPG, Windows Deployment, or DataGate WebPak may be installed on a single machine. The Windows Deployment and WebPak components are subsets of what is contained in the AVR installation package.

ASNA Wings is composed of several items, some of them are used exclusively at design time, others at design and run time, there are items installed on the Windows machines and there are others installed on the IBM i.

These are the ASNA components used at design time:

For run time, the ASNA components needed are:

The download packages on this page include the components for WDA, Monarch Collector and WebPak. The downloadable package for DataGate 15.0 for IBM i can be found here.

Installing Microsoft's latest service packs, high priority and optional software updates for Windows, the .NET Framework, and Visual Studio 2015 is highly recommended.

Windows optional update KB3118401 is required for correct operation of version 15.0. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3118401 for more detail.

The Wings Design Aid WDA has been tested on the following operating systems:

Caution: Ensure neither Visual Studio, its installation, nor any Visual Studio update is running at the time of Wings installation, as it may cause conflicts.

IE/Edge/Windows Installation note

If this software is downloaded via Microsoft Internet Explorer or Edge you may receive a message stating that this file "is not commonly downloaded" when attempting to install it. In this event click the View Downloads button, select the ASNA product to install from that list, and confirm that you'd like to install it.

Similarly, attempting to install the software directly through Microsoft Windows may cause a "Windows protected your PC" message to appear. In this event click the small More Info prompt on the left, and click Run Anyway on the following window.

Considerations for 9.0/8.0 side-by-side installations

Wings 9.0 is able to coexist with Wings 8.0 but earlier versions are not supported. Installing Wings 9.0 on a machine with Wings 8.0 will upgrade the runtime components (DG Client, Monarch Controls, AVR Runtime) to the level required by Wings 9.0. Both versions of Wings on the machine will remain usable for development purposes, but any assembly created by either will require Wings 9.0 Deployment or WebPak when put into production.

To avoid potentially serious errors, be certain to update to the latest version of the older family before installing the newer family.

Support for parallel development in Wings 9.0 and Wings 8.0 is limited to Windows 8 and newer environments.

Silent Installation Process

Wings now supports silent installations. See the Installation section of the Readme file for more detail.

Local Help Support

Visual Studio 2017 treats local (offline) as an optional component. As such installing it requires some additional steps:

When installing Visual Studio 2017:

  1. Under the Individual Components tab.
  2. On the Code Tools section.
  3. Enable the Help Viewer component.

To verify the Help Viewer is installed, look at the top of the Help Menu in Visual Studio. The following three options should be visible at the top of the menu:

  1. View Help
  2. Add and Remove Help Content
  3. Set Help Preferences

ASNA Runtime Changes

The version 15.0 of the ASNA family of .NET products introduces two changes in some ASNA DLLs.

1. ASNA.VisualRPG.Runtime.DLL expands into three new DLLs

The first change is that ASNA.VisualRPG.Runtime.DLL expands into three new DLLS: * ASNA.Runtime.DLL * ASNA.Runtime.Support.DLL * ASNA.Runtime.Monarch.DLL

This increased granularity was made to better match library improvements and DLL changes to the various ASNA products that use them. The details of this three-way split are shown below in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Version 15.0's new DLL structure

In Figure 1 above the namespaces each DLL provides is shown prefixed with {}. You can see that although ASNA.VisualRPG.Runtime.dll has been split into three DLLs the same namespaces are provided in the new DLLs. The version 15.x DLLs also provided a few new additional namespaces beyond what's shown in Figure 1.

To maintain backwards compatibility of version 15.0 with previous versions we ship an ASNA.VisualRPG.Runtime.dll library which forwards requests for any of the four original namespaces that where in that DLL to the corresponding new DLL. We will stop shipping the ASNA.VisualRPG.Runtime.dll with the next major version of ASNA .NET products. This forwarding version of this DLL will be available as a separate download.

2. ASNA.VisualRPG.Common.Sgml.dll has been deprecated.

The second change is that ASNA.VisualRPG.Common.Sgml.dll has been deprecated and its code has been moved to ASNA.Runtime.dll. This change mostly affects customers using Mobile RPG and Wings.

Changes you need to make because of these DLL changes

There are no coding changes you need to make in your projects because of these changes. The only changes you need to make is adding and/or deleting references. For new 15.x projects the correct project references will already exist.

In addition to removing that reference:

The ASNA.Runtime.* DLLS are located at:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\ASNA Shared\Client\15

For more details on the runtime changes click here.

Licenses Needed for ASNA Wings

ASNA Wings requires license keys on the Windows and IBM i machines.

On the developer Windows machine apply these license keys (Using the Registration Assistant):

On the IBM i apply these license keys:

Limitations of 9.0

This version of Wings has the following limitations:

Required IBM i configuration for Wings

Display files imported with the Wings Design Aid run in batch mode on the IBM i and require no specific SYSVAL settings. However, virtually all Wings installations will need to use the ASNA Terminal Emulator. Using the Emulator with Wings requires these IBM i SYSVAL settings:

Limitations of IBM Rational Open Access - RPG Edition

For more details, please see Chapter 6 in the document link below:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/wikis/form/anonymous/api/library/097983a0-b012-4248-9d0c-33ef89a6c3dd/document/88ce9ecc-1e14-4044-9c50-fc97700371d7/attachment/18aba9c1-7253-4de4-a534-f28e486de2e3/media/open_access_rpg_edition_5733OAR_2010_08_23.pdf

Differences in Format Level Identifiers

There are several display file features that are handled differently in Wings than on the IBM i with respect to the layout of certain fields in record formats, this differences cause the Format Level Identifiers used in Level Checks to be different for files exported by Wings and those created directly from pure DDS. The normal development cycle for Wings ensures that these differences do not cause any problems. This cycle follows these steps:

  1. Import Display File DDS into Visual Studio
  2. Optionally make modifications to the ASPX file created
  3. Export the ASPX back to the IBM i onto a library for Wings exported Display Files
  4. Add the HANDLER keyword to the RPG ILE program that will use the new ASPX as a workstation file
  5. Compile the RPG ILE program ensuring the exported Display Files library is found first in the library list by the RPG compiler

Some of the DDS features that cause Wings to generate different Format Level Identifiers are:




Changes Since Version: 9.0.98.0

Clients - DataGate

Clients - DataGate Controls

Clients - DataGate Explorer

Clients - DataGate Monitor

DataGate Server

DataGate Studio

Monarch WebControls