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Can anyone indicate a good 3270 emulator (which can login, scrape screen, find text, send keys etc. in background) for .NET (win and web). Something very similar to http://www.zephyrcorp.com/legacy-integration/index.htm (apparently zephyr costs like $5k per year, which is quite a lot, for one PC).

I also tried http://open3270.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets but it's way old and buggy.

Marcos Dimitrio
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CodingSlayer
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  • I'm somewhat surprised that the state of Open3270 is as bad as it is -- bad in that the sample code that comes with it doesn't work and that the code is so buggy. The underlying feature-set -- telnet and 3270 mode emulation -- hasn't exactly changed in the past five years. And it's not like mainframes and CICS is no longer in use. I would have thought this project would have been in a better state. – Mike C. Apr 01 '13 at 15:12

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Attachmate Reflection is really good, it meets all the requirements you mentioned and it has a great .NET API you can use to easily automate it from your .NET code. They don't list prices on their website but I think it is under $300...

Dean Kuga
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  • Which specific product in Attachmate's galaxy of offerings? Is Reflection a pure .NET solution or is it COM based? – Mike C. Apr 01 '13 at 20:28
  • The API is pure .NET. Some of the assemblies as well but the main executable is not... – Dean Kuga Apr 01 '13 at 21:07
  • We ended up buying Reflection for IBM. Its a pure .NET solution. They also provided wup with a month of free trial. http://www.attachmate.com/Products/Terminal+Emulation/Reflection/ribm/ribm.htm – CodingSlayer Jul 22 '13 at 14:47
  • I just contacted them and the sales guy at Attachmate said their product starts at $50,000 USD. It looks like a fantastic product, but 50K is half my project budget. – Mark Ewer Apr 29 '15 at 14:45
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For Desktop: I liked the idea of using a stable and well known client and remote control this instance. Therefore I ended up using x3270 (http://x3270.bgp.nu/) as the full featured, mature client in combination with X3270.Rest (https://www.nuget.org/packages/X3270.Rest/) that let's you remote control it from within a .NET application via the exposed REST interface (http://x3270.bgp.nu/rest.html). Reimplementing a complete new .NET client was not really an option because of all the alternatives out there. All those pitfalls on the road that lead to an reinvented wheel... But with an appropriate interface like the one mentioned it was quite easy to automate tasks without using DDE/HLLAPI. If running in the background means without visible window one could start the x3270 client from .NET via Process.Start with suitable arguments to avoid a window beeing created.

stev-e
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