Release Notes
ASNA Visual RPG® (AVR)
Version: 17.0.31.0
Release date: 2024-05-09


Important notices

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

Be sure to see the Visual Studio 2022 and .NET Framework requirements immediately below.

Microsoft made changes to the Visual Studio 2022 debugger and those changes are causing intermittent errors with AVR 17.x's debugger. These issues are more likely to appear in ASP.NET apps. R&D is currently researching this issue.

What's new for Visual RPG 17.0

AVR 17.x requires .NET Framework 4.8 for both development and runtime.

Be sure to see the note in the "Software Requirements" section about the KB3118401 Windows update required.

If you intend to install Visual Studio 2022's local help, don't miss the note about that in the DataGate Studio and Visual Studio 2022 and Local Help Support sections below.

Software Requirements

Platform support/product requirements

Platform support and product requirements are detailed on our Product Requirements page

Visual Studio Editions

Platform support and product requirements, including Visual Studio, are detailed on our Product Requirements page

Local Help Support

Visual Studio 2022 treats local (offline) as an optional component. As such installing it requires some additional steps:

When installing Visual Studio 2019:

  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

vs-2022-local-help

The following Visual Studio Workloads must be installed:

  1. .NET Desktop Development
  2. ASP.NET and web development.

Known Issues

Database Name change

database-name-change

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

The DataGate client software contained in this release significantly changes the way Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections are configured. DataGate SSL support was introduced in Version 15 as an option for secure network communications between DataGate clients and servers. In prior releases, DataGate client connection configurations, by default, specified an SSL-enabled connection. This allowed many users to enhance the security of their applications by simply installing the new, SSL supporting DataGate release. Unfortunately, other customers experienced connection and security issues due to shifting standards and evolving platform infrastructure supporting SSL, as offered by Windows and IBM i. In this release, DataGate client users must now "opt-in" when configuring new connections secured with SSL. When a new connection configuration is created, the default setting is to specify a non-SSL, or "clear-text" connection to the server. DataGate connections are typically configured as "database names". A database name is a collection of properties defining all the information needed to connect to a DataGate server from the client computer. Existing database names are not affected by this change, but new database names are affected: Database names created by prior releases retain the same SSL configuration as they had when created or modified. The default configuration of new database names will specify non-SSL connections.

Creating SSL-Enabled Database Names

Online documentation linked below fully details the process of creating an SSL-enabled database name configuration using DataGate Studio. The process is very similar for users of DataGate Monitor. [Read more about DataGate's SSL support](https://docs.asna.com/documentation/Help150/DataGate/SSL/_HTML/DataGateSSLClient.htm)

Other DataGate SSL Options

DataGate offers many options for enhancing the security of its client/server connection with SSL. For full details of options available for both the client and server, please [consult the online documentation.](https://docs.asna.com/documentation/Help150/DataGate/SSL/_Helphome.htm)

Configuring DataGate Connections Programmatically

Connection configurations are represented in DataGate as instances of the SourceProfile class in the DataGate .NET API. While most users and applications will configure connections via database names, some programs use the DataGate API directly. Users of the SourceProfile class are advised that the changes in this release may represent a **breaking change** to the behavior of your programs. The default value of the SourceProfile.SslOptions property is now SslOptions.None; in previous releases the default value was SslOptions.Request. If your program does not explicitly set this property, connections made with the SourceProfile instances you create will be clear-text, rather than SSL-enabled. If you directly create and use SourceProfile instances in your programs, ASNA highly recommends modifying them to explicitly set SourceProfile.SslOptions before deploying this DataGate release.

Database Name Migration From Non-SSL Releases

Database names created by DataGate releases prior to Version 15 do not contain SSL-related configuration information. When these database names are read by Version 15 software, the configuration is migrated to include SSL configuration options. Prior to this release, those migrations would enable SSL connections, unless otherwise explicitly changed by the user. Henceforth, automatic database name migrations will disable SSL in the connections they represent. Users who deploy applications using the database names contained in configuration files created with prior, non-SSL supported DataGate releases are advised that changes in this release may represent a **breaking change** in this deployment strategy, for reasons outlined in the previous paragraph.

ss-info

ASNA Runtime Changes

Version 15.0 of the ASNA family of .NET products introduced two changes in some ASNA DLLs. If you are upgrading from a previous release ASNA family release the following may apply to you.

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. ![](https://asna.com/media/images/version15.x-dll-changes-1.png?2) 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\16

For more details on the runtime changes click here.

dot-net-runtime-changes

Downloading with Microsoft Edge

If this software is downloaded via 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.

windows-installation-note



Changes Since Version: 17.0.28.0

DataGate Server

Visual RPG IDE Project