Introduction

TAS PROFESSIONAL TUTORIAL

To contact us

Computer Accounting Solutions

2736 Colorado

Kingman AZ, 86401

P. 928.257.1236

Email: support@cassoftware.com

Web site : http://cassoftware.com

INTRODUCTION

TAS Professional is designed to be a complete application development tool for graphical operating systems. It provides application building tools for the programmer new to application development, as well as the seasoned developer demanding professional quality development tools designed to work together from the beginning. These powerful utilities include:

Data Dictionary Manager

Database Maintenance Programs

Form Editor

Report Editor

Source Code Editor

Runtime Compiler

Program install builder

2 Database Managers to Choose from

TAS Professional includes over 150 commands, each with many options, and over 230 functions that can be used in expressions. Many of the TAS Professional commands can be compared to macro functions found in other high level languages. In other words, a single TAS Professional command can often replace several entire lines in other languages. Add to this the ability to create User Defined Commands (UDCs) and User Defined Functions (UDFs), and you now have a very powerful development tool.

Currently, TAS Professional runs only on the Windows® operating system, however, in the future we plan to run on Linux systems and directly on the Internet. Due to the design of TAS Professional, any programs you create to run on Windows® will run, without change, on these other platforms also. You will be able to change database managers at will. You won't even need to recompile the programs! This means that from the same set of programs you can have some users running Windows® some running Linux, maybe others on platforms to come, and all can be running the exact same set of programs accessing the same database. This is what we like to call write once run anywhere.

We also have plans to introduce other database engine to be used so you the programmer can decide what database engine is best for you or your customers.

What TAS Professional isn't? You're not going to write an operating system with TAS Professional. It isn't meant to replace programs like C++ or Delphi®. It was designed to give you the capabilities to easily and quickly develop general purpose business/financial programs with a graphical user interface (GUI). So, TAS Professional is also much easier to learn and use than C++ or Delphi®. Also with TAS Professional you do not need to buy any other software to develop very powerful scaleable solutions for yourself or for customers. When your ready to deploy your application to others all you need to do is purchase a nominally priced runtime for each server that will be using your application. Also with our new program manger you can reduce the numbers of files on the server from hundreds to only 3.

Programs compiled using TAS Professional requires a runtime program (TASRUNTIME.EXE) to execute. This reduces compilation time to a fraction of what's required for those other languages and produce very small runtime programs. Instead of multi-megabyte executables, you end up with a program that might be 50,000 bytes. It's this runtime program that gives you the ability to run the same program on multiple OSs, different platforms, eventually even totally different computer types with no changes required. Our term for this is: "Real write once/run anywhere." Truly, you'll only have to write it once, and you'll really be able to run it anywhere we have an appropriate runtime.

One of the reasons TAS Professional is so flexible and powerful is that it is built around a Data Dictionary. The Data Dictionary is a special TAS Professional data file that is used to keep track of every specification of every field in every record and file you create. This means that once you define a field you never have to worry about defining it again. Each time you want to use that field in a program, TAS Professional automatically looks up the specifications in the Data Dictionary. Storing the specifications in this way greatly increases the ease and speed with which you can create multi-file applications. By using similar fields with the same characteristics in different files, you can retrieve related records, such as finding all invoice records based on a given customer code.

TAS Professional uses Btrieve (copyright Pervasive Software) or CodeBase (copyright Sequiter Software) to perform all data file I/O, record and file locking in a multiuser system. A significant benefit of either of these is speed.

With TAS Professional you can typically find any record in a data file in one second or less. With smaller databases, finding a record can be almost instantaneous. Saving or updating records is equally fast. In addition, the speed is consistent regardless of the file size. It takes virtually the same amount of time to save a record in a file with 100,000 records as it does in a file with 1000 records. Even more important, you aren't forced to have a dedicated server with expensive software. In fact, if you have 5 users or less you don't need a dedicated server at all, unless you choose to.

TAS Professional allows up to 24 different sorts (keys) to be maintained on-line for each data file. With TAS Professional, you never have to re-sort a data file just to find a record

We will discuss the other parts of TAS Professional much more as you get deeper into the tutorial. So, let's start!

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