Articles

We have just returned from a very succesful conference in Cologne, called XBase.Future.

The conference was very well organized and we would like to thank the organization again for all their work. Maike, Michael, Meinhard and the other team members from Fischer and Consults, you have done a great job!

We can tell you many stories about the conference. But for us the change in atmosphere compared to last years conference was the most important thing. Last year many people were not happy with the lack of progress in Vulcan.NET and were seriously considering alternatives outside of the XBase world for their future development.

Our new XBase language has changed all of this. In the closing session one of the attendees perfectly said: "X# has brought us new hope".

---

We are proud that we can announce that today, at the first day of the XBase.Future conference, we have also released XSharp Beta 3.

This new Beta is full of new things, both in the compiler as well in the Visual Studio integration.

The new beta will also be included in the conference material for the attendees of the XBase.Future conference.

---

With only 2 days left until the XBase.Future conference in Cologne, things are becoming a little hectic over here.Fabrice has traveled from the sunny France to a cold Netherlands, and together we have prepared the new Beta 3 that will be presented and used at the conference. This new beta with comes with many great new features. Some hightlights of this new build:

Visual Studio Integration

• Support for the Windows Forms Editor
• Support for the WPF Editor
• Support for selecting the dialect (see compiler below)
• Enhanced project property pages with editors for paths and pre and post build steps

Compiler

• There is now dialect support in the compiler. The previus beta only supported the Core dialect. Now we also support the VO/Vulcan dialect.
• We have started work on the Bring Your Own Runtime support for Vulcan. See separate heading below.
• Improved debugging output
• New macros (__ENTITY__ and __SIG__ ) for the preprocessor
• New PARAMS keyword for parameter list of method/function
• Slen() and AltD() are now supported by the compiler
• Added support for the DYNAMIC type

Bring Your Own Runtime

• XBase type names are resolved properly (ARRAY, DATE, SYMBOL, USUAL etc)
• Literal values are now resolved properly (ARRAY, DATE, SYMBOL)
• NULL_ literals are resolved properly (NULL_STRING follows the /vo2 compiler option, NULL_DATE, NULL_SYMBOL)
• Calling methods with Clipper calling convention works as expected.
• Methods/Functions without return type are seen as methods that return a USUAL
• If a method/function contains typed and untyped parameters then the untyped parameters are seen as USUAL parameters
• The ? command will call AsString() on the arguments

Please come and meet us in Cologne. If you haven't registered: it is not too late.

 

---

Easter is only just one week behind us and we are already making good progress in a couple of areas:

Compiler

We have started to work on the "Bring Your Own Runtime" (BYOR) support.

So far the compiler recognizes the standard VO/Vulcan datatypes such as ARRAY, FLOAT, DATE etc. and maps these to the types inside the supplied Vulcan Runtime DLLs. Of course you need to bring the runtime for this. That is why we call it BYOR !
The compiler also correctly recognizes literal dates, literal symbols, literal floats, literal arrays etc.
Function calls in the Vulcan Runtime are resolved as well. The good thing is that X# will accept runtime DLLs from various versions of Vulcan. You do not need Vulcan 4, X# will also accept Vulcan 3 runtime DLLs, and most likely also Vulcan 2 DLLs.

In the rest of april we will implement the more "exotic" areas of the BYOR support and the VO/Vulcan dialects, such as the support for Clipper calling convention, VOSTRUCTS, UNIONS, the PSZ type, workarea access , the macro compiler etc.

Visual Studio Integration

We have had some set back in this area, but that has been resolved: we could not get the Winforms and WPF designers to work in our  project system which we have based on the new Common Project System (CPS) from Microsoft.
So we decided to switch back to the "good old" Managed Project Framework (MPF), with which we have ample experience.
Now both forms editors are working as expected. We have also added a Code parser (needed for the Winforms editor) and a CodeGenerator (needed for both tools).
We need to merge some of our code changes from the CPS version of the project system to the MPF version but that should not be too complicated

Come and meet us at the xBase.Future conference in Cologne two weeks from now. We will show you all the new stuff there!

---