Hello Encore!

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

For Visual Studio veterans, development with Encore RPG is a snap. For others, it’s maybe two snaps. This demo walks through creating the most ubiquitous and useless of all applications, Hello World, using only Encore RPG for Visual Studio.

All new Encore users may benefit from this quick hands-on illustration of the potential of combining Encore, .NET SDK tools, and Visual Studio.

This demo assumes Encore RPG for Visual Studio has been installed. Please review [Installation and Setup]/manuals/getting-started/Installationandsetup.html) if necessary.

Create the Project

  1. Start Visual Studio, then select Create a new project:

    Select "Create a new project" from the VS splash window.

  2. From the project types drop-down list, select Encore:

    Select Encore project types.

  3. The available Encore project types are shown. In this example, we choose ASNA Encore Console App, as highlighted below. Then select Next:

    Select Encore Console App project type.

  4. On the next page, give the project a name and location. Below, we chose HelloFromEncore to be the project name, and C:\EncoreDemo for the location. Then, select Next:

    Set project name and location.

  5. Finally, select the project’s “target framework”. Below, we chose .NET 8, which was the current “LTS” release for our Visual Studio version. You may select any version of .NET provided by your Visual Studio which is also supported by Encore SDK. Then, select Create to generate and open the project and solution:

    Select a supported framework release and click Create.

Modify and Run the Project

  1. After creating the project in a new Solution, Visual Studio opens the solution and displays the single Encore file the project contains (so far), Program.er, as show below.

    The project just created above is shown displaying the `Program.er` file.

  2. Next, edit Program.er as shown below. We added an empty line below the DclSrParm declaration in the Main “entry point” subroutine, then a single line to call the System.Console class’ WriteLine method:

    Note that as you type in code, Encore-enabled IntelliSense suggests likely class names and language keywords for you to use. The feature settings can be modified in the Tools|Options menu by entering Text Editor Encore General in the Search box, then selecting General from the tree view.

    Add the `Console.Write` statement to write a message to "standard output".

  3. Now build the project and run the program. Since this is a Hello World example, we can use the infamous F5 key, a.k.a, Start Debugging on the Debug menu. This command executes several Visual Studio commands in sequence (Save All, Build Solution, Run, and Attach Debugger):

    Save changes, build the project, and run via `F5`!

Additional Information

Language Concepts

Find out about the new Language Concepts when using Encore RPG.

Language Reference

Describes the Encore RPG programming language reference.

Getting Started with Visual Studio

Learn to code in Visual Studio

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