ASNA Newsletter 2025 - Quarter 2

Hot fun in the summer sun

Summer is here for us in the northern hemisphere and that means it's time to start thinking about the beach. Just kidding, you really need to be thinking about migrating your IBM i RPG application to .NET.

Jump start your summer with a little help from the Beach Boys (RIP, Brian Wilson).

This issue kicks off with some very important news about a product security update. Please be sure to read that article. Among other things, we've got other product news, a utillity for testing DataGate connections in Visual RPG Web apps, yet another Windows 10 warning.

ASNA security update

On July 8th we emailed you special bulletin about an important security update for our Windows-based products.

Read the security update FAQ here. Some summary points are:

• The security update resolves an issue related to .NET remoting, which we've used for years for backwards compatibility with some of our older products.
• This issue applies to both .NET Framework and COM-based products.
• The security update applies to our Windows-based products; DataGate for IBM i isn't affected by this issue.
• All current Generally Available (GA) products have been updated to resolve this security issue. We recommend that you upgrade to the least GA product versions as soon as possible.
• See the top of this page to download GA Products

Test DataGate connections with ASP.NET

Here is an easy way to test DataGate connections for your Visual RPG ASP.NET applications. The test is performed by a single ASPX page. This page doesn't need a compile step. To use it, put the file in the root of your IIS Website or virtual directory to test and then point your browser to it. All of the code needed (server side AVR, markup, CSS, and JavaScript is all in this one file.

The test page is shown below. It tests connections DataGate for IBM i, SQL Server, and DG Windows and Servers. Figure 1 below shows how the tester looks when the connection succeeds.

The test page can also do a test read on one of your files. You can see the in Figure 1 that when the library, file, and fieldname are provided, the read is performed and its results are shown. This might come in handy testing user permissions.

If the connection fails, the info shown below in Figure 2 is displayed. The IP address and the port status are reported when the connection fails.

Get the 'test-dg.aspx' page here. The GitHub repo referenced is a full AVR Web project, but that is only for testing the page. You need get only the 'test-dg.aspx' page.

Details about the test page are available here.

How to grow a second brain

Obsidian is a free note-taking application. Unlike alternative browser-based SAAS apps, Obsidian is a free, cross-platform PC-based application. Obsidian stores your content as local markdown files. This ensures that your content isn’t at the mercy of a venture capitalist pulling the plug on your note-taking application.

Obsidian is the least opinionated software in the world and requires a measure of fiddling to be truly useful. While confounding at first, with a little diligence and patience, I found it to deliver a huge payoff.

Read more about Obsidian

Windows 10 demise imminent!

Time is rapidly running out to make plans for life after Windows 10.

Useful Windows 11 upgrade links:

• Windows 10 end-of-support announcement (with FAQs at the bottom of the page)
• Windows 11 system requirements
• How to check Windows 11 compatibility

You need an ASNA Product Tsar

Organizations often lose critical ASNA expertise when their champions retire, as there is typically little written ASNA production documentation to pass on to their successors. To solve this problem, you need an ASNA Product Tsar.

Read more here about why you need an ASNA Product Tsar

ASNA product updates

Here are several product updates. Please take special note of the ASNA 17.0/11.0 product versions. They have been superseded by 17.1/11.1 versions.

• The 17.0/11.0 products will not get the security update. The 17.0/11.0 builds of Windows products (the Oscar family) no longer receive any updates and are replaced by the 17.1/11.1 builds (the Otis family). The impact of this is that if you are using a 17.0/11.0 product you need to update with the 17.1/11.1 product to get the security updates mentioned in the previous article. The 17.0/11.0 family will not receive the security updates.
• ASNA Mobile RPG. Mobile RPG is now bundled with ASNA Wings. Download Wings 11.1 with Mobile RPG here
• ASNA Go. As announced last spring, ASNA Go formally retired on June 30th, 2025. When ASNA Go was introduced it provided features that were not available natively in browsers. However, browsers have matured so that they now natively perform the tasks that once required ASNA Go. We don't anticipate any coding changes needed to swap out ASNA Go for the native mobile features in Wings 11.1.
• DataGate for SQL Server (DSS) support for SQL Server 16 retired. Microsoft retired SQL Server 2016 on July 31, 2021 and we've retired it as a supported platform for DSS.

The latest ASNA products downloads