News

New .NET tool teaches old Picks new tricks

• By Rich Seeley
• December 17, 2003

Making applications based on the old Pick Systems platform available as Web services via Microsoft .NET is the goal of a new product under development at Raining Data Corp., an Irvine, Calif.-based business software vendor.

Company officials said PickDP.NET will support Microsoft Whidbey, the XML-enhanced version of Visual Studio .NET development tools scheduled for release in the later half of 2004.

Raining Data, formed in 2000 out of the merger of Pick Systems and Omnis Technology Corp., is concentrating on moving from legacy to what the company refers to as ''Web-centric business software.'' The company's Pick Data Provider for the Microsoft .NET Framework is already integrated with Visual Studio .NET 2003.

Mario Barrenechea, senior vice president, sales and marketing at Raining Data, noted in the announcement that in the IBM UniVerse, IBM UniData and Pick D3(superscript) legacy markets there are companies with ''hundreds of 'black-box' applications that have limited access to new technologies.' The PickDP .NET tool allows developers to integrate applications and data into Web services applications 'without compromising the integrity of their legacy applications,'' he added.

The current Pick Data Provider integration with VB .NET 2003 is making it more economical to re-develop IBM UniVerse database applications in the Web services model, according to Ron McPherson, president of New England Computer Solutions, Peabody, Mass. He noted that his company experienced a 60% to 70% reduction in code in the re-development of a UniVerse-based manufacturing job control application that was moved to the Microsoft .NET Framework using the Pick Data Provider.