pasUnity 4.45.0.0 RTM is now generally available.

This release contains new architectures, functional improvements, significant improvements to performance, and enhancements to dynamic code compilation.

x64 Support

pasUnity now ships with a native 64-bit edition that targets the x64 chip architecture.

Managed Code Compiler Improvements

Until now the pasUnity Managed Code and Managed Assembly job steps used the compilers that ship with the .NET Framework for dynamically compiling and executing code during job execution.  While this is nice there have been several improvements made to the Visual C# and Visual Basic languages made over the years released separately from the framework as NUGET packages for developers.  We now incorporate the latest version of these CodeDOM compilers into pasUnity and will be constantly incorporating updates to these CodeDOM compilers in future builds of pasUnity.  This ensures that implementers will be able to use their favorite features (like interpolated strings).  The code snippets included with the product have been updated to use new syntax that demonstrates these capabilities.

Query Designer

The Query Designer has been enhanced so that it is Macro aware and connection-aware in the context from which it is launched (by using the F4 key).  The Query Designer can edit and write back SQL statements to contextual editor locations in the UI and if those locations are associated with connection strings the designer can automatically connect to them and execute code when prototyping.  Macro commands that require Work objects will have them making prototyping in context much easier.

FTP Enhancements

FTP job steps have undergone slight modifications to improve support with poorly implemented or legacy FTP servers.  In some cases, the default 64K buffer sizes were found to be too large for older systems and as such the default is now 32K.

POP3 Message Improvements

Improved POP3 message parser will no longer fail to parse messages that have email addresses in invalid formats.  Now, email addresses that include display name and email address will attempt to parse both portions of the address but if the display name contains errors or invalid characters and address is correct the address portion will be retained.  SPAM tools that intentionally obfuscate or attempt to disguise their origin will no longer fail to parse but will now succeed with additional attributes appended to indicate the issues encountered during parsing to make it easy to write rules to delete those messages.

Message Viewer Improvements

The POP3 and Database message views now only load the message header information by default and do not retrieve the messages themselves until a user clicks on them in the UI.  This yields tremendously higher performance rendering the UI.  Additionally, the split view HTML message reader has been enhanced to enable easier message viewing and analysis.

Exception Handling Improvements

Up until now the pasUnity exception viewer consolidated exceptions from both the product and custom code executing by the Managed Code, Managed Assembly, PowerShell, and SQL Script job steps.  This unfortunately made finding defects in the product much harder as it was difficult to separate the custom code exceptions from the product exceptions.  Custom code job steps now log exceptions during code execution ONLY to the job log and not the global exception log.  Sometimes, there may be a desire to audit some messages more thoroughly.  Implementers can use the UnityException.LogException method in code to write those messages into the globabl exception logs if necessary.

Macro Commands

pasUnity has a new Increment macro which can be used to generate auto-incrementing numbers during job execution.  These macros are scoped to a single unit of work.  

The DateFormat macro has been enhanced to provide support numeric date formats often encountered in JDE and DB2 based systems.  The macro can convert number => date or date => number.