Wednesday, 30 March 2011

NOTE: Yet more EG Custom Tasks

In the past I've bemoaned the lack of (free) third-party Enterprise Guide custom tasks (add-ins). Nothing much has changed in that respect, but SAS's Chris Hemedinger recently released another. On this occasion it's for shrinking character variables to the minimum length required for each.

A blog reader who goes by the name of MakingUpTheNumbers commented on my earlier custom tasks post by saying
The problem I generally see with Custom Tasks is that IS people don't want to get into deploying .NET based stuff, 'just' to implement richer dialogues/front-ends etc for shrink wrapped back-end processing.
I'm inclined to agree. MakingUpTheNumbers continued:
IMHO we could do with some sort of embedded "scripting" that was sandboxed to basically do rich cross field dialogue validation. Surely there's something off the shelf SAS could embedded to allow this, and enable users to have "nice" entry points to stored processes, without having to get into heavy weight development and deployment with .NET.

"VBA for EG"
It's certainly the case that many SAS shops are reluctant to invest in additional language skills for their staff and/or to commit to supporting and maintaining application components written in non-SAS languages.