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PhilF
Guest
This is a long-ish post, intended to document the issues I came across so that perhaps they might be addressed. You don't need to read the whole thing to get the idea, which is: If I were looking at Progress and PDSOE as a development platform, I would probably give up on it fairly quickly, after concluding that the product lacks polish and good documentation, and probably doesn't work too well. My environment is Windows 10, Progress 11.7.3 64-bit. I'm an experienced developer, and I've been using Progress for decades-- so if I can't make it through the sample code then something is probably wrong. It's not that Progress doesn't have a lot of documentation -- it certainly does, and much of it is excellent. But I keep getting stuck trying to find it, or to make my way through it. Most of my work over the years has been in a character environment. I've learned enough of Studio, PAS and other "new" technology to be slightly dangerous. But there is a lot of meat to these tools, and a lot of options that I simply don't understand. I thought it was time to learn the tools in depth, and being a good developer I turned to the documentation. The first thing I thought I would do was look at some of the sample code. Handily enough, PDSOE includes a variety of samples. AutoEdge|TheFactory sounds like a good place to start. Nope: it requires Savvion BPM components, and I don't have those. Well, maybe I'm starting in the wrong place. Let me try reading the documentation. Ah, here we go: "Getting Started: Introducing the Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge Visual Designer." Perfect. Till I get about half-way through the first chapter. "Note: OpenEdge Ultra requires the installation of OpenEdge® Ultra Controls for .NET, which is an optional product. OpenEdge Ultra is required if you want to complete the exercises in this manual." OK, I don't have that either. Isn't there any sample code I can just run? Back to the Sample Code. There's a whole BPM section I can ignore -- AutuEdge|TheFactory should probably be in there -- but I can look at the .Net stuff ("OpenEdge Ultra Controls for .NET). It's not what I'm looking for, but at least it's something. Clicking on that brought me to the web page :"OpenEdge Ultra Controls for .NET Illustrative Samples"), which tells me "The sample can be launched from the Proenv by changing to the relevant sample's folder, and running prowin32.exe -p runner.p" As a beginner, I probably would have gotten lost at "launched from the Proenv". Then I would have gotten lost a second time at "'prowin32.exe' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file." But I'm an old Progress hand, and I know things. I typed pro p -p runner.p and for my troubles, I got: "You can only use the .NET event loop in a GUI application. (15809)" Oops. OK; instead of prowin32, I'll try prowin64. Nope. How about prowin? Hooray! I can run a demo of some .Net controls -- which teaches me next to nothing about PDSOE. But at least it's running! But wait! I spoke too soon. Whenever I press "Launch Sample," I get a small grey window with no functionality. Unless I run from code instead of the pecompiled runner.r, in which case I get messages like "System.IO.FileNotFoundException. Could not load file or assembly 'Infragistic4.Documents.Reports.v15.1, Version=15.1.2015.... etc." It turns out that the “OpenEdge Getting Started: GUI for .NET Primer” is no better. It points you to a page where you can find downloads – but once you have found them, they do not match the documentation. I downloaded the 11.0 Samples and the 11.0 Documentation Examples. But then it tells you to look for the relative directory “src\samples\advancedgui”, which does not exist. If you dig a bit, you can find runner.p under “src\samples\GuiForDotNet\UltraControls”, but that doesn’t work any better than the above. It just fails more silently. I then started reading the “Getting Started: Progress OpenEdge Studio” document. Huh?. “Click the AppBuilder icon from the Desktop toolbar to start the AppBuilder. …. Choose Tools -> Application Compiler from the AppBuilder menu. … Click the Run button from the PRO*Tools palette.” This seems like the wrong way to get started with Studio. (Oh, wait: I guess that OpenEdge Studio is not the same as Progress Developer Studio. But how would a newbie know something like that?) So, what else have we got? “Developing BPM Applications With Developer Studio.” But as above, I don’t have BPM tools. Hey, look. If you search the doc table of contents for Studio, there is a link at the bottom to “Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge.” I click on it – and after changing to an Adobe Flash-enabled browser I get a lot of stuff about “Architect.” Huh? What’s Architect? (Again: How would a newbie know? The linked-to videos show stuff from OE 10.2A, which is probably going to confuse as much as enlighten.) So: scrap the docs, and scrap the samples. Let's do some tutorials. Look – I’m back to 10.2A Architect videos again. If I were evaluating Progress, I'd be probably give up at this point and move on to a product that works. And don’t get me started on Kendo UI Builder…. Please: can someone tell me that I’m just being dense, and that a smarter person would not be hitting these roadblocks? -- Phil
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