XSharp XPorter example
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- Created: 28 September 2016
We have added an example to the downloads section on the website with which you can convert your Visual Studio solutions with Vulcan source code from Vulcan.NET to XSharp.
Navigate to https://www.xsharp.info/itm-downloads?folder=general%252FSamples to download the example and start converting your projects.
One year later: XSharp Public Beta 7
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- Created: 26 September 2016
Last year in the last week of September we have announced XSharp at the DevShare conference in the United Kingdom.
One year later XSharp is no longer a promise but a full blown product!
We are pleased to announce that we have released XSharp Beta 7 both to our FOX subscribers and to the general public today.
XSharp Beta 7 is a major step forward, especially compared to Public Beta 1 from February 2016.
Many new features have been added to the product, and major steps have been made to make X# compatible with Visual Objects and Vulcan.NET.
This version has almost all of the features that are needed to compile Vulcan.NET applications.
We still call this version a Beta version because it misses a very small number of features to compile your Vulcan applications, but the quality of the product is not Beta software at all but Release quality.
Now is a great time to look at XSharp and to test your VO and Vulcan code with XSharp.
XSharp Beta 6
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- Created: 15 August 2016
We are pleased to announce that we have released XSharp Beta 6 to our subscribers today.
This build contains many improvements in the VO/Vulcan compatibility area. A selection from these changes:
- Added support for compile time codeblocks
- Added support for all kinds of Aliased Expressions (useful with RDD based data access)
- Added support for VO Compatible string comparisons
- Indexed properties can now be used by name (String:Chars for example)
- Indexed properties can now be defined with overloads with different parameter types (int and string for example)
VO and Vulcan support is nearing completion!
Some new features in this build
- Added a new syntax to define EVENTS (with ADD and REMOVE keywords)
- Completed the support for the .Designer.prg for windows forms inside visual studio
- X# now properly works side by side with the Vulcan project system inside Visual Studio. We no longer "steal" the language service from Vulcan projects
- Performance improvements in the source code editor for large files
This new build is available for download for FOX subscribers on the FOX download page on this website.
The Needs of the Many...
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- Created: 21 July 2016
Last week I was on a holiday with my family in Normandy in France.
Some of the touristic highlights that we visited were of course the D-Day beaches Omaha, Utah, Juno, Gold and Sword where the allied forces started the liberation of the Northern part of Europ on June 6, 1944.
Near those beaches we also visited the war cemetaries where thousands of solders from the US, Britain, Canada and other countries were buried. This was very impressive as you can imagine.
The thought about these (mostly) young men that have given their lives to help liberate Europe, makes you feel very grateful and sad at the same time. You know that each person has left behind parents, or wife and children who have had to miss their loved sons or husbands and fathers.
At the same time the number of casualties was of course much smaller than the number of people that were killed by the occupiers. Compared to these numbers, the number of deceased allied soldiers was relatively low.
This reminded me of the famous quote from Spock in Vulcan "The needs of the wany outweigh the needs of the few, or the one".
I am sure that these soldiers and their families did not have something like that in mind, but I am glad that the allied leaders have chosen to liberate Europe, even when they could know that this would mean serious losses of allied lives.
Dilemma: how compatible do you want to be?
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- Created: 02 July 2016
We are reaching the end of the process to implement the BYOR (Bring Your Own Runtime) support and we are working on some of the more obscure things inside the compiler: implicit and explicit conversions and the related compiler options, such as /vo4 and /vo7.
Numeric comparisons
If you would ask any normal person which number is bigger: -1 or any arbitrary positive number, then most people will say that -1 is smaller. Now ask the same thing to a computer and you may receive diferent and unexpected answers. Consider the following example program:
FUNCTION Start AS VOID LOCAL dwValue AS DWORD LOCAL liValue AS LONG liValue := -1 dwValue := 1 ? liValue < dwValue RETURN
Compile this code in Vulcan and it will compile without warnings, but the result will be that liValue (-1) is NOT smaller than dwValue (1).
XSharp Beta 5
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- Created: 21 June 2016
We are proud to inform you that we have released XSharp Beta 5 today to our FOX subscribers.
It has taken a little longer than expected / hoped, but it is full of new features that make the product very compatible with VO and Vulcan.
Next to the obvious bug fixes there are lots of new features in this build, most of which are for the VO/Vulcan dialect only
Progress report May 2016
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- Created: 29 May 2016
It has been a few weeks, so it is time again for a progress report.
Free Software
We have worked on the legal side of distributing free software. In the top menu from this website you can now find an option that describes under which licenses we distribute our software. We have decided to use a couple of different licenses.
- A license that describes how you can use the compiled version of X# and which components you can include with your product. This is the XSharp Open Software License Agreement.
- A second license, the Apache Open License, that describes what you can do with the source code to our runtime and tools
- A third license, The XSharp Compiler Source Code License, that describes what our FOX subscribers can do with the source code for our compiler.
Please look at the separate page on this website for more details.
Github
The XSharp source code is available on Github. Please read this FAQ article on where you can find it and how you can contribute.
XSharp Beta 4
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- Created: 08 May 2016
We are proud that XSharp Beta 4 is available for download for our FOX subscribers.
On top of the changes that we already listed in a news message last week, we have now also added support for some additional VO and Vulcan compatibility topics:
- BEGIN SEQUENCE... RECOVER USING ... END
- BREAK.
- We have also added support for the /VO10 compiler option (Compatible IIF expressions, where the TRUE and FALSE expressions are of a different type).
- And finally we restored the behavior that the call to the parent constructor no longer has to be the first line inside a constructor (for VO and Vulcan dialect only). That way you will be able to create Clipper calling convention constructors and set default values for missing parameters before calling the Super constructor. Or call a PreInit() method before the super constructor.
As said: this build is for download for FOX subscribers only.
The next public beta is planned for the second half of June 2016, and should contain the full VO and Vulcan compatibility support as well as some enhancements inside Visual Studio and our first XSharp Runtime.
We would finally like to remind you that the introductionary price for the FOX program ends this month.
Stay tuned for more news!