BMC AMI DevX is an integrated software platform that provides mainframe development teams with modern Application Development and DevOps capabilities. The solution connects traditional mainframe environments with contemporary development practices through components for source code management, testing, debugging, and analytics.
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Visual Studio
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Visual Studio (now in the 2022 edition) is a 64-bit IDE that makes it easier to work with bigger projects and complex workloads, boasting a fluid and responsive experience for users. The IDE features IntelliCode, its automatic code completion tools that understand code context and that can complete up to a whole line at once to drive accurate and confident coding.
I love these tools! However, my company has not yet transitioned from SCLM to a modern repository, and this is causing most of our developers to remain within TSO for all their development. It's been a slow adoption up to this point, but we are moving toward more modernization this year and next, so with any luck, we'll see usage pick up. Success depends on the speed at which your management is willing to move.
It's useful for app development, debugging, and testing. I've been using it for two years and have seen it grow into a fantastic tool. All of the features, NuGet packages, and settings that enable different types of projects are fantastic. It also has a connection to Azure DevOps and Git. It's a fantastic product that's simple to use.
The tool I use is fairly intuitive. It doesn't take long to be using it full time.
Changing the layout/view is fairly easy. This allows it to fit individual preferences.
It is helpful to be able to view specific windows in full screen. Usually, I have it set up to view multiple windows, but sometimes, I just want to view one window in full-screen mode.
Since Microsoft offers a free Community Edition of the IDE many of our new developers have used it at home or school and are very familiar with the user interface, requiring little training to move up to the paid, enterprise-friendly editions we use.
The online community support for Visual Studio is outstanding, as solid or better than any other commercial or open-source project software.
Microsoft continuously keeps the product up to date and has maintained a history of doing so. They use it internally for their own development so there is little chance it will ever fall out of favor and become unsupported.
Certain settings and features can sometimes be challenging to locate. The interface isn't always intuitive.
Sometimes there are too many ways to do the same thing. For example, users can quickly add a new workspace in Source Control Explorer when a local path shows as "Not Mapped," but it doesn't indicate that the user might want to check the dropdown list of workspaces. The shortcut of creating a new workspace by clicking on the "Not Mapped" link can lead to developers creating too many workspaces and causing workspace management to become unwieldy. If the shortcut link were removed, the user would be forced to use the Workspace dropdown. While it can add an extra step to the process, workspaces would be managed more easily, and this would enforce consistency. At the very least, there should be a high-level administrative setting to hide the shortcut link.
VS is the best and is required for building Microsoft applications. The quality and usefulness of the product far out-weight the licensing costs associated with it.
The thing I like the most is Visual Studio doesn't suffer from Microsoft's over eager marketing department who feel they need to redesign the UI (think Office and windows) which forces users to loose large amounts of productivity having to learn software that they had previously known.
Support has been amazing compared to Optim. Further, new features are very regular with File-AID - I can't remember the last time Optim had a significant update. File-AID support is very receptive to feature requests and reported bugs, including sending out hotfixes quickly.
Between online forums like StackOverflow, online documentation, MSDN forums, and the customer support options, I find it very easy to get support for Visual Studio IDE when I need it. If desired, one can also download the MSDN documentation about the IDE and have it readily available for any support needs.
The names may have changed over the years, but anyone who has been around for a while will recognize them. For Software Configuration Management, I have used TSO/ISPF/SCLM, Panvalet, ChangeMan, Librarian, Endevor, and now Code Pipeline. All of them met the basic requirements. All of them had their advantages and disadvantages. Code Pipeline, however, stands head and shoulders above the rest in simplicity, completeness, effectiveness, efficiency, and elegance.
I personally feel Visual Studio IDE has [a] better interface and [is more] user friendly than other IDEs. It has better code maintainability and intellisense. Its inbuilt team foundation server help coders to check on their code then and go. Better nugget package management, quality testing and gives features to extract TRX file as result of testing which includes all the summary of each test case.
Possitive impact. It is main product suite to enable devops in the mainframe applications team. All developers use these on day-to-day work.
Negative impact: Recent usability issues caused disappointment in the application teams. It became hard motivate the development community to increase usage.
We've had hundreds of hours saved by the rapid development that Visual Studio provides.
We've lost some time in the Xamarin updates. However, being cross platform, we ultimately saved tons of time not having to create separate apps for iOS and Android.
