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Introduction

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TAS Professional  powered by CAS (Computer Accounting Solutions) 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 and features include:

 

Data Dictionary Manager
Codebase & Btrieve databases direct access support
Database maintenance programs
IDE Summary
Form Editor
Report Editor with barcode support
Source Code Editor
Runtime Compiler
Skins Editor
Install Builder
Auto Resize of forms
over 50 Screen objects
Spell Checking
Skins  over 50 pre built skins to choose from.
MAPI Support. Send email from your applications using programs like Outlook© and Outlook express©.
POP3 Support.  Send and receive email in your TAS Professional applications.
Shell Support with file association
Serial port support
FAX Support
PDF file support. and many other formats.
Automatic MDI (Multiple Document Interface)
Plugin This allows you to add your favorrite program right to the TAS PRO IDE.
Advanced Memory Management (as of version 7.2 build 4)
SQL allows you to work with SQL databases like MYSQL,MS SQL Ect.. (As of 7.2 Build 4)

 

TAS Professional  includes a very powerful IDE  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.

 

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©

 

Programs compiled using TAS Professional require 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 executable's, 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 when 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 multi user 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. We hope in the future add more databases for the programmer  to use like MYSQL, Firebird, interbase, Access and others.  This will add even more to the flexibility and power.

 

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.

 

Since June of 2003 Computer Accounting Solutions (CAS) purchased the right to copy (Copyright) license to TAS Professional and Advanced Accounting. Portions ©1984-2003 MGM Holding, Inc. 

 

We have taken up where the creator of TAS Professional  (Phil Mickelson) left off.  Phil decided after 20 years of writing software he would retire from software development.  We at CAS wish him well and thank him for his dedicated work over the past 20 years on this software.  We hope we can keep TAS Professional alive and growing.  For all of us that have used and grown to depend on this software to serve the end users of our programs. Also for future programmer's that want a fast easy to use tool to build professional database solutions.

 

We hope to continue this work for many years to come and make TAS Professional powered by CAS an ongoing development project.  We hope to be adding more features to this programming tool for many years to come. If after purchasing and using TAS PRO you have any recommendations for the product we look forward to hearing from you. If needed TAS professional powered by CAS can be customized to fit your needs. 

 

You can email us at support@cassoftware.com We also have a free email support system setup for your use where you can talk to other TAS Professional programmers around the world.  Even advertise your services or products as long as they have something to do with TAS Professional powered by CAS.

 

Here is the link to our email group Button

 

We look forward to working with you.

 

The Staff at Computer Accounting Solutions

 

 

 

 

 


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