Often I go to clients where the standard IDE for developing SQRs is Notepad.  Now this will work in a pinch but after staring at that for a few minutes I decided there had to be a better alternative.  With the budget of $0 and needing something immediately, the solution was Notepad++ and a custom language file.

 This solution will provide you with:

• Syntax Highlighting
• Syntax Folding ( Collapse Functions \ Procedures )
  
• Advanced Find \ Replace Functionality
• Tabbed Documents 

The setup is quite simple.

1. Download and Install Notepad++ 
2. Download my custom User Defined Language File (UserDefineLang.xml (35.43 kb))
3. Save the UserDefineLang.xml to your%appdata%\Notepad++ directory
4. If you had Notepad++, Close and Open it.
5. If you open an SQR file, you should see the syntax properly highlighted, if not go to the language menu and scroll to the bottom and choose SQR.

I have to give credit to some others for their work on the language files as for the most part I have copied and enhanced their version (SQR, PeopleCode,Cobol and PowerShell)
If you are looking for additional languages, the Notepad++ site or a google search should find it for you.

I'm going to follow this up with a few other useful things you can do with Notepad++ and PeopleSoft development.

Update 08-Apr-2009: Check out my new post on syntax checking and running a SQR from within Notepad++!

If you found this useful, please click and look at one of the ads on this page.  It's where I get the money for this site.  Thx 

 

 

Another alternative is you want to pay is:

 SQR Express  ( 30 day trial available ) 

 I've used it as well and it is very good and adds quite a bit of additional functionality.

Repost from my old Blog:

In PowerShell I was looking for a way to let a user enter a password while hiding the characters they typed.  My reason for this is that I wanted to pass it as command line parameter to an application.  I found that the built in Read-Host -assecurestring would cover the users typing with astricks but the object returned was a SecureString.

The securestring object does not have a property or method to allow you to retrieve the unencrypted string.  The reason for this is for security.  You need to explicitly write something if you need to get the string.  In many cases you will be able to provide the SecureString to other objects that will use it for such things as credentials

To get the convert a securestring to a string value you need to first use the Marshal Object to convert the SecureString to a intPtr (pointer).  Then use the Marshal's method of PtrToStringAuto to convert the intPtr into a string. 

The example code is:
$secret=[Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::PtrToStringAuto([Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::SecureStringToBSTR((read-host -assecurestring)))

If you found this useful, please click one of the Google links.

Welcome to the new site.  I have switched over to BlogEngine.Net.  Installation was simple and so far so good.