Jackson Lumber, ProSales Magazine’s 2014 “Dealer of the Year,” migrates their back-end solution from an OpenVMS-hosted xfServerPlus solution to a Windows-hosted WCF solution with native Synergy .NET

Since 1946, Jackson Lumber & Millwork has been providing quality building materials to professional builders and project-minded homeowners. They use a Synergy/DE application to manage many of their internal functions, including sales, inventory control, manufacturing, purchasing, dispatching, marketing, and accounting.

Over the years, Jackson Lumber has tweaked and fine-tuned their application substantially, resulting in a very robust and powerful solution. Looking forward, however, they knew it would be critical to have a back-end solution that supports all of today’s modern standards.  It would need to communicate with the rapidly changing device world, as Jackson Lumber’s users and customers would soon be demanding access to information from anywhere, at any time, on any device. Being able to deliver this functionality would be a key component to the future success of the business.

Jackson Lumber embarked on the project in two phases. Read more...

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 on Monday. (See their announcement here.) To support the update, Synergex has released a new developer build, which you can download here.

Update 1 includes a number of new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Highlights include .NET Framework 4.6.1 version, unit test enhancements for parallel test execution, source control workflow enhancements (Pull Requests hub), and XAML designer fixes and improvements.

In addition to support for Microsoft’s update, our developer build also includes support for the inline lambda syntax, null coalescing operator, and Xamarin 4.

For a complete list of features in Update 1, see Microsoft’s release notes.

Investing in the look and feel of your applications doesn’t matter…or does it?

By William Mooney

Years ago I used to say to our direct corporate end-user customers, “You’re lucky. It doesn’t matter what your application(s) looks like because you’re not selling to compete for new business—all that matters is that it works well and meets your business needs.” End-users plugged merrily along, content to focus on functionality and substance, often in the form of a green-screen front end. In fact, many of those customers claimed that a character-based/green-screen application was much more efficient than using a “cumbersome mouse”—especially when it came to data entry.

Read more of William Mooney’s blog post

OpenVMS is alive and well

By Don Fillion

I recently attended the OpenVMS Boot Camp in Nashua New Hampshire. I am pleased to report (with a nod to Mark Twain) that rumors of the death of OpenVMS were greatly exaggerated!

Read more of Don Fillion's blog post

Updated PDF API

By Steve Ives

A few weeks ago I announced that a new API called SynPSG_PDF had been added to the CodeExchange. Today I am pleased to announce that the API has been updated and, in addition to Windows, is now also supported on systems running Linux (32-bit and 64-bit), OpenVMS (AXP and IA64) and Synergy .NET.

Read more of Steve Ives’ blog post  

Ever wonder why a client/server application doesn't always seem to run at the same speed in TCP/IP? This skit will enlighten you.

Watch the video!