Introduction
In October 2023 we are organizing our second European conference, after a successful first event in 2022.
Since we are a small open source project, and we have limited financial resources, we have chosen to organize this as a relatively low budget event. We have also selected a location in the south of Germany, so developers from Switzerland, Austria, and North Italy are also able to come with a reasonable travel time.
We will present the current state of the X# development and show how to migrate your apps to XSharp. Furthermore, we will also discuss the internals of X# and how you can extend X#.
Finally, we will discuss our future plans, such as our support for next versions of .Net and will show some work in progress.
This summit is structured to encourage open and facilitated face-to-face discussion and idea sharing amongst all attendees. Refreshments will be provided all day, with scheduled lunch and snack breaks.
Location
The event will take place at the following hotel:
Hotel Weisses Ross
Kalchstraße 16
87700 Memmingen
Germany
https://www.hotelweissesross.de/
Agenda
During the last months, we have received several questions from (beginning) X# users about the conversion from their apps to X#.
We have come to the conclusion that it may be worth to organize "Q&A sessions" now and then where we can go into more detail about these issues.
The first of the sessions is planned for Friday, April 28, at 16:00 CEST (GMT +2). The length of the session is scheduled for 1 hour.
We will use Zoom for the session.
The zoom link for the session is: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89972905261
If you have a topic that you want discussed, then you can send that topic (or your code) to info@xsharp.eu. If you do, then we have some time to prepare.
Of course, we will also try to answer questions that come up during the session, but we can't guarantee that we will have the answer ready then.
If there are no questions at all, then we'll probably show some of the things we have been working on.
Jonathan Neil (Edwards Sound, Lighting & AV) has shared his experiences with the conversion of a very Inventory Tracking application, written first in Clipper and later in Visual Objects 2.7 to X#.
You can find his article here.
Important in this article is his experience that migrating his application to X# and recompiling it in X# has helped him to solve several ( 40+ ) serious errors in his VO code that the VO compiler had missed. Fixing these errors helped to make his VO application more stable (while working on the migration to X#).
Jonathan has also shared his experience with the Dev Express XtraScheduler control in the following forum post:
https://www.xsharp.eu/forum/public-product/3239-job-and-employee-scheduler#25898
In the last years we have had some requests about our plans for ReportPro.
Many people have told us that they really like ReportPro, but it could use some improvements and its UI could use some "modernization".
We have also considered adjusting ReportPro, so it will be able to process (converted) FoxPro reports.
We are going to introduce several new features while maintaining the previous compatibility as much as possible.
We have been in contact with Italian developers that want to work on this.
At this moment, we would like to know the size of the community and what you are looking for.
We have added a "Poll" to our Forum with some questions and a list of changes that we want to make.
Please click here and leave a reply with your answers.
Today we have released an installer (for our FOX subscribers) for XSharp Cahors 2.15.0.3 which contains some fixes for problems reported with X# 2.14, and some new features.
The what's new document describing all the changes can be found here:
|
XSharp 2.15 what's new
Popular 2.15.0.3 614.06 KB |
2023-02-23 |
{rsfiles path="fox/Compiler/XSharpSetupFox2.15.0.3.zip"}
There is NO public release 2.15 planned.
Until now, we have told you that X# 3.0 will be for .Net next and that X# 3.0 will be the next release after 2.15.
Some of you have told us that you think .Net next is less important than some other things that we have on our to-do list.
We have discussed this and decide to listen and change our priorities.
Not that .Net next is very difficult w.r.t. the compiler and runtime, but full support inside Visual Studio takes a bit longer than we expected.
We will therefore work on several other things first that many of you have asked for:
- RDD on top of SQL (through Ado.Net)
- Client/Server RDD, where the server connects to the database, and the client can only access the data through the server (like Advantage does).
The server could then use normal DBF files, but also a single user SQL database, like SQLite or a normal SQL database. - Completion of the Unicode/AnyCPU GUI and SQL classes for VO users,
- Completion of the converter and runtime classes for FoxPro users,
Our original plan to drop support for Visual Studio 2017 after X# 2.15 is still in place. In the build after X# 2.15 we will deliver a VSIX file with the Visual Studio integration as we have in X# 2.15 that you can keep using with VS 2017.
New development in the Visual Studio integration will be for Visual Studio 2019 and later.
The upcoming build 2.15 is being tested in the team. We expect to release it to our beta testers next week. Hopefully we can release this "Carnival build" to our subscribers in around the 20th of February..
A short message with our progress this month.
As you can expect, we're hard at work for X# 3. This is planned for the end of this Quarter.
However, we will also release a new build 2.15 (for subscribers only). This build will contain several bug fixes and also some new features. The most prominent new feature will be that we have added our own X# expression evaluator to the Visual Studio debugger.
This means that expressions in the intermediate window but also the watch window and breakpoint conditions can be 100% X# expressions. Identifiers are case INsensitive, you can call X# functions, refer to locals, globals, dynamic memory variables, even to fields in the current workarea, or when you use the AREA->FIELD syntax to any open workarea.
This was a major piece of work, but we're very happy to announce this.
Due to technical requirements, this will only work with Visual Studio 2019 and later. We will still support VS 2017 with build 2.15 (withoiut the new expression evaluator), but that will be the last build in which VS 2017 is supported.
Starting with X# 3 we will no longer support VS2017. So it is now time to upgrade!
Something else that you can expect is a "make over" of the X# website. We're using Joomla 3 for the website at this moment.
This product is "end of life" by the end of this year. We're moving the website over to Joomla 4 and will make some changes to the template and some of the components that we have used.
With pain in our heart, we have decided to cancel the planned X# Summit in Austin, March 2023.
The number of registrations so far is so low that we cannot take the financial risk of organizing the event.
We will see if we can organize an event to replace it, maybe "virtual".
We will keep you posted through this website.