What is the best IDE to use for programming in RPGILE for the AS/400 ? Can you connect to a 400 using Visual Studios IDE?

Question

What is the best IDE to use for programming in RPGILE for the AS/400 ? Can you connect to a 400 using Visual Studios IDE?

I'm a C# programmer who fell in love with Visual Studios and also am a lot younger than allot of the folks who have been working with rpg programming for years using the pdm editor.

My question, is there a way to code in RPGILE / connect to AS/400's in Visual Studios?

My follow up question - is there another IDE I should be using? Dear god, all I need is intellisense!

Thanks in advance, and much respect to the RPG programmers out there.

Answer 1

This has a close vote because typically tool recommendations are off topic for Stack Overflow. However, I will answer this because there are really only a few IDE's available.

RDi

Rational Developer for i is the official RPG development tool, and as of v6.1 of the operating system, the only editor for RPG from IBM that supports the full RPG spec. SEU was stabilized back at v6.1, and does not include support for any of the RPG or SQL goodness that has been added since then. Virtually every RPG program I write now will throw dozens of errors in SEU, and my system is only at v7.1 (for the moment).

MiWorkplace

Mihael Schmidt has a low cost alternative to RDi. For €27.50 (roughly $30) you get the most used features of RDi, but there are several features you will miss. The most significant of those, in my opinion, is the outline view. However, if you are on a tight budget, and you need to write RPG, or you are just learning, this is a capable IDE. There is a free version of this pre-configured for use with pub400.com.

Notepad++

Not really an IDE, with apologies to those who love it, but Liam Allan has provided a plugin for free-format RPG if you just need a quick and dirty editor that can color your code. He also has another plugin to let you execute remote commands and parse the compile error listing.

Orion

If your source is in the IFS, you can use Orion. Orion is an open source browser based editor that has been included in 5733OPS option 8. It is still a little lean, but may be a competitor to Notepad++ depending on your circumstances.

Visual Studio Code

Like Orion and Notepad++, your source must be in the IFS to use Visual Studio Code, but its popularity is growing, so I included it here. Note that this is not Visual Studio, but a seperate editor from Microsoft. You will want to install the RPG Language Plugin from Niels Liisburg to get the RPG source highlighting to work. Update 2021-03-02 Check out the new code-for-ibmi plug-in for VS Code.