Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

Like most people, I hate purchasing something only to find out a piece is missing. If you’ve been merrily rolling along with Visual Studio (VS) 2005 and recently upgraded to 2008, or if you’ve started tinkering with some .NET tutorials with VS 2008, you may have noticed something odd. There’s a piece missing! The .NET Data Provider for i5/OS that comes with V6R1 System i Access does not appear as an option in the Visual Studio 2008 data source configuration wizard. (This tip only applies to the V6R1

I’ve been writing free-format RPG calculations for several years now, yet I still find myself missing a couple of old friends. No, I don’t mean GOTO and TAG. I refer to MOVE and MOVEL. Usually I can find a way to avoid them, but occasionally, it gets a bit difficult.

For example, suppose I read an eight-digit numeric field that identifies a customer. Into this field are loaded two pieces of information. The first two digits are a company number. The last six digits contain a customer number. (This is by no means far-fetched; we have been doing this sort

I recently performed a complete i5/OS system restore, using my weekly system save and a current daily backup. During the restore, I cleared and restored my user libraries from the daily backup, except for the QUSRSYS or QGPL libraries, which were current. However, once we start saving output queues on i5/OS V5R4 (we’re still on V5R3), how should I restore QUSRSYS and QGPL, where our output queues reside?

–Rich

Although QUSRSYS and QGPL technically aren’t IBM libraries, on most systems they usually contain some user and third-party objects. Looking at one of my systems, here’s what I found in QGPL: