List of Speakers and Sessions
There will be 3 tracks at the event:
- Migration from Visual Objects (VO)
- Migration from Visual FoxPro (VFP)
- General topics
The sessions for the VO track and VFP track will be done in parallel in 2 separate rooms.
The general sessions will be done in the main session room.
|
Speaker |
Session(s) |
Track |
|
Peter Monadjemi |
Asynchronous programming with X# |
General |
|
Wolfgang Riedman |
Gui Choices for VO Programmers |
VO |
|
Andrej Terkaj |
Building MAUI applications with Blazor and X# in the backend. |
General |
|
Stefan Hirsch |
Web Applications with X# Backend and VueJS Frontend |
General |
|
Fabrice Foray |
Introduction to Visual Studio |
General |
|
Nikos Kokkalis |
The evolution of X# core. |
General |
|
Chris Pyrgas |
Migrating Visual Objects Apps to .Net with X# (with Robert) |
VO |
|
Robert van der Hulst |
Migrating Visual Objects Apps to .Net with X# (with Chris) |
VO |
|
XSharp Devteam |
Opening Session |
General |
Preliminary Conference Schedule
Click here for more information about the location and costs
| Fabrice Foray | Track | Summary |
| Introduction to Visual Studio | General | - First use from the VO Repo-based perspective - Editor, Settings, jump to code and more (XMLDoc, Hints, Parameters, ...) - References and NuGet - Using Git as Version control - Extensions add |
| Migrating Visual FoxPro apps to .Net with X# | VFP | - Compare VFP and X#, from a VO-based developer point-of-view  - First use of the VFP Xporter : How it works, Settings, What you can expect - Common troubles, Third parties - Make your way in your new code |
| Stefan Hirsch | ||
| Web Applications with X# Backend and VueJS Frontend | General | First I will show our complete product with its current development state. Then we will look into the backend part and go through the whole workflow. Starting with configuring the server, loading plugins, loading scripts, adding routes, starting the server. After the server startup we look into the request handling that can be done in a plugin or by an X# script. Here we will have a look into scripting, how we merge scripts, call them with parameters and get return values. After that we will build a little demo project that can host a web site and can handle some GETs and POSTs for data fetching and data putting. In the second part we will focus on the frontend part. We will have a look into the structure of our vue application, with all the components, store, helper functions, how we handle plugins and the build process. Then we will start building a demo project from scratch using VisualStudioCode. Vuejs and vuetify will be used as our frameworks. We will build a simple frontend with some data fetching and data putting. Frameworks: |
| Nikos Kokkalis | ||
| The evolution of X# core | General | A lot of effort is devoted to the various dialects, but I think it's nice to have a session about X# core. Maybe talk about integrating new C# features, or come up with something new. And perhaps showcase some work-in-progress? |
| Fun things to do (with dotNET) on a rainy day | General | This will be about some advanced topics. May include some things on multithreading, async, performance optimizations, but will also talk about things internal to dotNET and the CLR. |
| Peter Monadjemi | ||
| Asynchronous programming with X# | General | "The world is asynchronous" In this presentation, Peter will show examples for using the keywords async and await and the underlying task class with Winforms applications. Both keywords are probably still new for the majority of the X# developers. He will also point out a few of the base library classes with asynchronous methods based on tasks. Using asynchronous technique leads to user interfaces that are more responsive, don't freeze that often, and to applications with a better overall performance. Although for WinForms application there are simpler alternatives like the BackgroundWorker class, when it comes to mobile applications using async and await becomes obligatory (maybe I can present an C# or X# example that uses .Net 8 and MAUI). |
| Chris Pyrgas | ||
| Migrating Visual Objects Apps to .Net with X#, Part 1 & Part 2 (with Robert) | VO | This session will show how to migrate Visual Objects applications to .Net with X#. It will cover: - The VOXporter and the options available for migrating your apps - Using the converted application in XIDE (Chris) - Using the converted application in Visual Studio (Robert) - Common problems found when converting applications from VO Please note that the contents of this session is VERY flexible. When there are only "experienced" X# attendees, we can change this session into a tips and tricks session targeted at VO developers. |
| Wolfgang Riedmann | ||
| Gui Choices for VO Programmers | VO | You have VO applications, maybe some of them ported to X# and would like to build new applications in X# and you don’t know what type of GUI to use?
This session cannot give an answer, but can give you some oversights over the choices you have and gives you a sample application for every type shown. Starting from a simple VO application based on DBF tables you will see possibile developments from a simple migration to a WPF application. |
| Andrej Terkaj | ||
| Building MAUI applications with Blazor and X# in the backend. | General | Andrej will show the way to use X# in apps that will look much fresher to the younger generations than the established windows forms GUI. We will step into .NET 7 with X# Core dialect. We will also get an insight into modern environments where different programming languages can be mixed (X#, C#, CSS, HTML and JavaScript).
Furthermore, we'll learn what's behind the word MAUI and whether we can use X# to build apps for Android, iOS, Windows and Mac Catalyst operating systems. We will build a simple application that will be installed on a smartphone and that will allow to edit data from a MySQL database on a remote server. We will also learn how to create web services and how to do CRUD operations on data so retrieved. |
| Robert van der Hulst | ||
| Introduction to the X# SQL RDD | General | There were many requests from the VO community to add an RDD to X# that you can use to access data from SQL database. This RDD, so is the idea, could be used to replace ADS (Advantage Database Server), since SAP is no longer actively supporting this product. In this session Robert will show the upcoming SQL RDD for X#. This RDD will allow you to: - Select data in "Query Mode" with a select statement DbServer{"Select * from Customers"}
DbServer{"Customers"}
In Query mode, the RDD will fetch all the data from the server into a read only local cursor. You can use normal Xbase filtering on that result set and also create local indexes. In Table mode, the RDD will build select statements to fetch the data from the database. By default, it will not fetch all rows (you do not want to fetch a million rows from a server) but will limit the # of returned rows. Through a callback mechanism, you can control the behavior of the RDD. The RDD is not written for a specific SQL backend. Syntax differences between various backends are handled with a special layer, where for example the syntax is defined to limit the # of rows (SELECT TOP for SQL Server, LIMIT for MySql, using ROWNUM in Oracle etc.) In this session, Robert will demonstrate the new RDD and will show and discuss the design. |
| Creating apps for the Web and Mobile using Blazor and FoxPro | VFP | In 2022, Microsoft introduced a new style of developing applications for the Web, as well as for mobile devices, using a product called Blazor. Blazor apps can run on any web browser using a technology called WebAssembly, server-side in ASP.NET Core, or in native client apps. Blazor front ends are usually coded with a mixture of Razor and C#. However, Blazor apps can also call code developed in other .NET languages, such as FoxPro code, compiled for .NET with X#.
There is A LOT of learning material about Blazor on the web already. This session will present an overview and will explain the differences between server side apps (running in ASP.NET Core) and Blazor WebAssembly apps. We will also show how you can run FoxPro code in an XSharp layer behind the Blazor apps to use existing business logic for new applications. This code will be running from a web server. This means that some things are allowed, but other things not. We will look at some issues you can expect. We will also look forward to a new version of Blazor that has been announced (Blazor United). This new version can be seen as a mix between Blazor Server and Blazor Client, where some components are running on the server, but other components are running on the client. You will learn:
|
|
Opening Session & Closing Session |
General | |
|
Various customers |
||
|
Application Show |
General | During this session, various customers will demonstrate the programs that they created with X# and explain some of the decisions that they have made during the migration process. |
| Fabrice Foray | Summary |
| Git for Dummies | Maybe you are not using a Version Control System, or you are using one but not Git. We will discover the basis of Git usage, as a single user or as a team. We will explore how you can use it with your local hard drive, on your own LAN server or on the web. |
| VFP Migration | Even if XSharp and VFP belongs to the same xBase family, it can be a great challenge to port an application from VFP to XSharp. We will see how different the operating principles are, specifically regarding GUI, but also the solutions that XSharp is providing. Furthermore, we will see how the VFPXPorter can help you to start your migration. |
| X# notebooks | This (freak night) session demonstrates how you can combine code and tutorials in markdown files. A Notebook is a file with cells, and each cell can be of different types : Notebooks were originally a Python thing, mostly used by universities. A cell can contain text in Markdown format with instructions and help, or some code in a specific language, XSharp now, that you will need to test and amend to your needs. Microsoft has decided to provide a .NET-way to use these, and now we can use X# in Notebooks. We will see how X# Notebooks are a great tool to learn and practice various libraries, compare results in different .Net languages. |
| Nikos Kokkalis | |
| Consuming AI models | Not another session on ChatGPT! We will instead discuss running models locally on your PC using X# (GPU-accelerated too, if you have a decent GPU). |
| New Language Features | What's added since our previous meeting in Memmingen. We will also discuss the difficulties we are facing on keeping the compiler code updated. |
| Peter Monadjemi | |
| Getting out of technical debt | How to improve code quality with NDepend. This presentation discusses various means to improve the quality of your X# code by using the commercial tool NDepend. The main focus lies on the general term technical debt, how it can be measured, what it’s made up and how it gives developers and project managers an orientation about the overall quality of the source code. The presentation will show several examples of how to use the NDepend API with X#. Another topic will be general metrics like Cyclomatic Complexity (CC), naming conventions (of course) and how to use quality gates as a part of an CI pipeline. Peter Monadjemi is an experienced developer who uses X# for many years within a large project. He rediscovered NDepend recently after forgetting about it for several years, and was amazed about an A-rating in the NDepend dashboard for the source code of the large project he is working on with other developers for many years. |
| PowerShell as the X# developers best friend | PowerShell is a command line tool from Microsoft that is based on the same .Net runtime that X# uses. Both share the same runtime and the same type system. The interactivity of the PowerShell Command line makes it a very attractive sidekick to Visual Studio or XIDE. The presentation will start with a short overview about how the PowerShell type system differs from the regular .Net type system. The next topic will be about customizing PowerShell as part of Terminal to make it more appealing. The presentation will show many examples about how to search the X# runtime for certain types or methods, do ad hoc database queries against any kind of DBMS, update the database schema or use a PowerShell script as a “poor man's static code analyzer” for an X# project with a nice dashboard. |
| Chris Pyrgas | |
| Using X# to the max | How to use powerful language features that are little known or not widely used to write better/more readable/more robust code and boost productivity and performance. Topics will include local functions, tuples, lambda expressions, code patterns, language extensions, special keywords and statements and many more. Can be divided into part I & II (standard and more advanced topics). |
| XIDE to the max | XIDE contains a lot of undocumented or not widely used features, that very few (if any at all) developers know about. We will discuss code, project and configuration templates, visual designer inheritance, the plugin system and many more smaller or bigger features for enhancing productivity. |
| Wolfgang Riedmann | |
| Accessing a web service from plain X# | More and more customers are using web applications like Wrike or Hubspot, and are requiring to exchange data between them. This session will show you how to build a dataexchange layer both synchronous and asynchronous. As a goodie, the interface also works for plain VO applications using X# build COM libraries. |
| DBF to SQL | Slowly DBFs will be replaced by SQL databases, because users are requesting more and more filters on large tables and are not more accepting the time delays required to filter DBFs. This session will show you on an example application how to move an existing application partially to a PostgreSQL database to make your migration affordable using a SQL based Dataserver. |
| Holger Steinmar | |
| Using Build Automation for building and testing | In this session, we will demonstrate how to automate the build process, including running tests and deploying the result of the build process. We will set up a sample project and go through all the steps from build to deploy. We will use the tool Nuke (https://nuke.build/). |
| Robert van der Hulst | |
| Error Handling & Logging | The .Net error handling differs a lot from the error handling inside languages such as Visual Objects and FoxPro. This session will discuss the differences and will show you how you can create applications that produce error logs that you can use to debug potential errors in your app. We will also look at logging solutions |
| SDK projects, Multi Targeting and Creating Nuget packages | Building apps for recent versions of .Net with Visual Studio requires a different project file format. In this session, we will take a look at this format and also show how to create projects that produce output for multiple targets (e.g. .Net Framework and .Net 8 or 9) and how to bundle these in a single (nuget) package. The MsBuild system will then select the appropriate DLLs for the target framework that you are using. |
| Github Copilot | This (freak night) session covers the new Github Copilot, that is supposed to help you in writing and documenting code better. Is it any good and does it work with X#? |
|
Opening Session & Closing Session |
|
|
Various customers |
|
|
Application Show |
During this session various customers will demonstrate the programs that they created with X# and explain some of the decisions that they have made during the migration process. Alessandro Vacchiano (Computers Centre, Italy) and Joshua Wiser (Azyra, Ireland) will show their apps. |
Introduction
In October 2022 we are organizing our first European conference in years. We first tried to do this in 2020, but due to the international Covid crisis that event had to be cancelled.
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 chosen 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.
The main audience for this event is XSharp developers with VO/Vulcan background. However we will also spend ample time on the other dialects.
We will present the current state of the X# development and show how to migrate your apps to XSharp. 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 of the work in progress
With the help of our local partner Karl Faller we have selected a venue for the event.
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
Kalchstr. 16
87700 Memmingen
Germany
https://www.hotelweissesross.de/
Speakers
| Speaker | Bio |
|
Wolfgang Riedman |
Wolfgang Riedmann is the founder of the small software house Riedmann GmbH in Meran, South Tyrol , Italy, specialized in individual software development. After working in Cobol on a mainframe, he started to work in Clipper, and then in VO starting with the long awaited prerelease. When X# was presented, he put in production the first small applications written in this language, and today more than the half of ist work time is done in X# using XIDE. Wolfgang wrote also some articles in the Software Development Techniques journal, and spoke also on some VO and X# conferences. Living in Italy, but with German mother language, he also has connection in both the German and the Italian X# and VO community. |
|
Meinhard Schnoor |
Meinhard is working as a self employed IT consultant. He has studied computer sciences and has over 40 years of experience in the area of software development. Starting his programming career with Pascal, Assembler and Cobol, he adopted the xBase languages beginning with Ashton Tate's DBase environment and moved early to the Clipper compiler in summer 87. |
|
Andrej Terkaj |
Andrej Terkaj, Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering , born and living in Slovenia.. I started my professional career in 1980 as a software project manager in Iskra Delta, the largest Slovenian computer company to date. In 1987 I founded private company Task Ltd, where I was not only the owner, but mainly a software developer. After more than 30 active years in the development of software for the logistics and maintenance sector (Computer Maintenance Management System Radix ) I closed Task Ltd. in 2018 as my retirement was approaching. I am a long-time VO developer, since the very beginning of Visual Objects, and before that I used other programming languages: Nantucket Clipper, Ashton Tate dBase, Borland Turbo Pascal and Fortran. Within the Visual Objects programming language I also used bBrowser and VO2Ado to be able to successfully manage data for different relational databases, most of them MS SQL Server I've taken programming as part of my life, so now I'm even more immersed in modern programming tools. |
|
Fabrice Foray |
After a first encounter with personal computing and a Tandy TRS-80 in the early 80's, it was the use of Clipper 86 that led me to xBase languages. I have been teaching computer science in France for more than 30 years, especially with C++, Java and C# languages, and at the same time I continued the xBase adventure with CA-Visual Objects, Vulcan.Net and finally XSharp! |
|
Nikos Kokkalis |
Nikos Kokkalis studied Computer Engineering at the Democritus University of Thrace, and there also earned his doctorate. He has worked as an independent software developer since 1996 for Anadelta Software and Intracom Telecom. Since 2016 he is an employee of Intracom Telecom. During 2011 - 2015 he was a member of the GrafX development team. Since Sept. 2015 he has been a member of the XSharp development team.
|
|
Robert van der Hulst |
Robert van der Hulst (The Netherlands) has been part of the IT industry since the 80's. He started developing applications in DOS with dBase, Clipper and FoxBase, C and Assembler. Later he developed applications for Windows and .Net with C/C++, Visual Objects, Vulcan.Net, Visual FoxPro, and C#. Robert has created several 3rd party components for Visual Objects and Vulcan developers and has been part of the Visual Objects and Vulcan.Net development team, and worked there on the compiler, IDE, runtime and RDD systems. In 2015, Robert founded the XSharp (X#) Project , together with Fabrice Foray (France), Nikos Kokkalis (Greece) and Chris Pyrgas (Greece). They were all colleagues from the former Vulcan.Net development team who decided there was a need for an open source implementation of XBase for .Net.
|
Sessions
| Wolfgang Riedmann |
| SQL Data Access in .Net |
|
Often programmers think that SQL is SQL and that there are no big differences. Unfortunately this is not correct, and since I have programming experience with several big SQL database engines, I will first present an quick overview of some of the most used products and their strengths and licenses (open source and commercial). Then I will show some differences than affect the programming with these and that need to be respected when working with them. As last part, I will show an approach how to build libraries with a simple common interface that is able to mask some of the differences between the different engines. Of course, the sources of these libraries will be shown and will be available for download after the conference. |
| Andrej Terkaj |
| USING X# IN WEB APPLICATIONS: Blazor and X# |
|
I am very happy with the opportunities I have to acquire the latest knowledge in software development. I have finally found the environment I have been looking for more than 10 years, so that I could at least partially use my "old Visual Objects" - tested code and move it to a web applications. The main purpose of my talk will be to introduce you to the possibilities of web development with the X# programming language. Yes it is written correctly. X# in a web environment. It might be better to write X# and Blazor together. The Blazor environment is the one that will show us that this is also possible. There is nothing written in the literature or in the media about this. Personally, I came up with the idea of trying X# in the Blazor environment, because Blazor is based on C# and C# is based on the .NET (code name Roslyn) compiler platform. And Roslyn is a set of open source compilers and APIs not only for C# but also for X#. I'll show a concrete example that will demonstrate a simple working application using X# Core dialect and migrate it to the Azure Service Cloud. We will show how different programming languages (from X#, C#, HTML, CSS, javascript) can interact with each other and how a small application is visible on different operating systems and devices (including Android and iOS). In this example, we will perform simple CRUD operations using different methods of accessing the SQLite database. Last but not least, we will finally demonstrate the correctness of our choice of Blazor framework in the latest MAUI environment. My last goal for this talk is to say: it's never too late to learn new technologies. My topic will offer you the possibility or the way to use X# in apps that will look much fresher to the younger generations than the established windows forms GUI. Now you have the chance to put on your the .Net Core big boots and try to jump as many high steps as possible. |
| Meinhard Schnoor |
| How to use X# in VO using COM Servers as SxS Components |
| Meinhard demonstrates how to develop COM components in X# and how to use them in Visual Objects. The main focus will be on the development of the components and best practices according to Microsoft. The second part of the session will concentrate on how to make the written components usable in VO by applying the Microsoft's side by side technology, so it will not be necessary to install these components. Instead he will demonstrate the use of manifests so these components can be xcopy deployed with you VO application. |
| How you should do logging and error handling in X# (.NET) |
| When moving your development from Visual Objects to the .Net world, you open the door to a complete new cosmos. Looking into the projects of a lot of my customers, I often see that the concept of logging is not present or at least neglected. Meinhard will show how to introduce this in your own programs, by using available packages from the .Net universe. The second part will address exception handling. Lots of X# programmers still use the mechanisms delivered by Visual Objects (Begin Sequence Recover) and ignore the new technology completely. Meinhard will show why this is not a good idea and demonstrate how to achieve this by adopting the new language constructs in X#. By applying widely accepted best practices you will learn how to enhance you error handling to the next level. |
| Fabrice Foray |
| Migrating Visual Foxpro Projects to X# |
|
Showing VFPXPorter application; How it can move Forms & Projects of a VFP Application to XSharp, WinForms and Visual Studio projects. What changes it implies, some common troubles we may have and how to solve them. |
| Nikos Kokkalis |
| Runtime code sorcery with X# |
|
Working with scripts in X#: taking advantage of the compiler and macro compiler. |
| Robert van der Hulst |
| .Net Next |
|
So far the most of us have created applications for the .Net Framework. This session tries to put these various implementations of .Net in perspective and will show you how you can use X# for these various targets. |
| X# Runtime Advanced Tips and Tricks |
| During this session Robert will demonstrate some of the "new" and not very well known features that were added to the X# Runtime. Some examples are: - Workarea Events - Event handlers that repond to changes in settings inside the Runtime State - Subclassing X# RDDs - How does the X# Runtime handle multi threading. What about open workareas? What about the runtime state? - and more |
| X# Development Team |
|
Opening Session & Closing Session |
|
Various customers |
|
Application Show |
|
During this session various customers will demonstrate the programs that they created with X# and explain some of the decisions that they have made during the migration process.
|
Session Schedule
Here is the (preliminary) session schedule for our summit in Memmingen, 2 weeks from now.
| Thursday | |||
| From | Until | Topic | Speaker |
| 09:00 | 09:15 | Welcome and opening | X# Devteam |
| 09:15 | 10:30 | SQL Data Access in .Net | Wolfgang |
| 10:30 | 10:45 | Break | |
| 10:45 | 12:00 | How to use X# COM Servers as SxS Components | Meinhard |
| 12:00 | 13:00 | Lunch | |
| 13:00 | 14:15 | X# Runtime Advanced Tips and Tricks | Robert |
| 14:15 | 14:30 | Break | |
| 14:30 | 15:45 | Runtime code sorcery with X# | Nikos |
| 15:45 | 16:00 | Break | |
| 16:00 | 17:15 | Application Show | Various attendees |
| 17:15 | 18:30 | Break + City Tour | |
| 18:30 | 20:00 | Dinner | |
| 20:00 | 23:00 | Evening program | |
| Friday | |||
| From | Until | Topic | |
| 09:00 | 10:15 | Converting FoxPro code to .Net | Fabrice |
| 10:15 | 10:30 | Break | |
| 10:30 | 11:45 | How you should do logging and error handling in X# (.NET) | Meinhard |
| 11:45 | 12:00 | Break | |
| 12:00 | 13:15 | Using X# in web applications - Blazor & X# | Andrej |
| 13:15 | 14:15 | Lunch | |
| 14:15 | 15:30 | .Net Next | Robert |
| 15:30 | 15:45 | Break | |
| 15:45 | 16:45 | Closing session | X# Devteam |
Registration
To register for this event, please send an email to info@xsharp.eu.
We have the following registration fee for the event:
| Description | FOX Subscribers |
Others |
| - Early bird (book before September 2022) | 350* | 400* |
| - Normal price (starts September1, 2022) | 450* | 500* |
- This includes the refreshments, lunch and dinner on the 6th and refreshments and lunch on the 7th.
- We expect people to arrive on Wednesday October 5.
- We have negotiated a special discounted hotel room price of EUR 90 per person per night including breakfast for a Single room. Double rooms are available at EUR 137 per night including breakfast. Local taxes may apply. You can book directly with the hotel https://www.hotelweissesross.de/. and tell them that you are part of the X# Summit group.
- Room are available from Wednesday 5th until Saturday 8th.
- For those attendees that are staying until Saturday 8th, we plan to go out and have dinner together on Friday 7th in a restaurant in Memmingen.
- Please note that all prices are excluding 21% VAT for EU residents. If you register as a Company and let us know your VAT number then we will not have to charge the VAT.