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More than a year ago, we have published our first development Roadmap for the X# project. This new roadmap continues the tradition and describes what our plans for 2017 are.

Click here for a PDF with this document which also looks back at what we have achieved in 2016

Our plans for 2017

You will not be surprised that the open items from our roadmap for 2016  are still on the to do list for 2017. Some of the things on our to list:

  • Improved Visual Studio support:
    • Nuget support
    • Editors for the VO Binaries
    • Support for other VS subsystems, especially those that are based on T4 templates.
    • “Intellisense” features for the editor, such as completion lists, parameter tips, Goto definition etc
    • Class browser and Object browser support
    • Debugger support for Globals and X# expressions

  • Create the X# runtime, so you no longer need the Vulcan Runtime to run your apps that use RDDs and the VO SDK classes. Our intention is not only to replace the Vulcan runtime, but also to improve it.
    After all, we have done this before, so we can do it again, but then better!
    • Thread Safe runtime and RDD system
    • Runs on AnyCPU
    • Support Runtime Macros AND scripting (our macro compiler will support the complete language!)
    • Portable where possible. Unfortunately, there are many areas (IO related mostly) that can’t be completely portable

  • Add support for an extra xBase language. At this moment, we are considering to add support for (x)Harbour. The (x)Harbour community is very active and seems to be the most interesting target audience.

When
Name
Contents / Motto

April 2017

Spring 2017

Most “intellisense” features in VS
X# Scripting/Macro support
First version of the Runtime

July 2017

Summer 2017

Complete X# Runtime

October 2017

Autumn 2017

First version of (x)Harbour support

Christmas 2017

Winter 2017

Complete version of (x)Harbour support

We are proud to announce the release of XSharp Beta 9.
This beta mainly focuses on bug fixes and compatibility With this build we consider the VO and Vulcan support completed: the complete Vulcan SDK compiles as well as 99.9% of the 3rd party products, such as ClassMate, ReportPro, bBrowser and Vn2Ado. You should have no problems compiling your Vulcan code with this build of X#.

Many changes to the compiler have been released before as Beta 8a and Beta 8b. We have made some more changes since beta 8b mostly as a result of your feedback, for which we are very grateful.

This build also includes updated Visual Studio integration. Unfortunately not with Code completion and other editor features, but we did make quite some changes to the build system and project system. Not all of these are directly visible, but we fixed some glitches, especially with regard to dependent items, resource compilation, the error list etc. We have now also enabled all the VO compatibility compiler options in the project properties dialog.
And if you are wondering "where is my intellisense": we have decided to delay the Code completion support until the next build because we were not completely satisfied with it.

You will also find quite some changes in the documentation. All of the compiler options are documentation now, and we have included a list of the most common error numbers and messages.

Today we are uploading both a build for our Friends Of XSharp (FOX) subscribers and a public build. This public build is identical to the FOX build but does not include the optimized version of the compiler.

Last but not least: our special 30% discount on the price of a FOX subscription was expiring this week. We have decided to extend this price until February 15th. Click here to subscribe now

 

We are proud to announce that a new prerelease version of the X# compiler is available for download for our FOX subscribers.
You can find the ZIP file with the new compiler in the prerelease downloads folder on this website.

With this build you can compile the Vulcan SDK without changes, except for some obvious errors in the Vulcan SDK that Vulcan did not find! One of our team members will write a blog article about these errors, since you may have similar problems in your code.

We consider the Vulcan Compatibility of the compiler nearly finished with the current state of the compiler. All Vulcan code should compile without problems now. Of course the real test is with compiling and running YOUR source code.

Please try this version of the compiler with as much of your code as possible and let us know which compile time and which runtime problems you find.

The next builds of the compiler will focus on bug fixing and adding some VO compatibility options such as UDCs, VO compatible DEFINES, VO compatible numeric conversions etc.

The next full build of the product (Beta 9) will contain this new compiler and improved Visual Studio support and is expected a few weeks from now.

For those interested, here is a summary of the changes in the compiler since Beta 8:

  • Added support for PCall and PCallNative
  • Full support for INIT procedures. We also added EXIT procedures.
  • Added compatibility command line options /ppo, .showincludes, /vo1, /vo6
  • Changed several method resolution strategies. Calls without object/self prefix will resolve to functions first and when no function is found then it will look for instance methods
  • Added support for DEFAULT TO, ACCEPT, WAIT and QUIT commands
  • Allow multiple indexed properties per type and allow to use the indexer name, such as the string:Chars collection
  • Code generation has been optimized for several language constructs
  • Debugger step information has been improved for a better debug "experience".

The full list of changes is included in the ZIP but also available as download in the General section on this website.

If you are not a FOX subscriber and want to test this new compiler with your code: sign up now.

On behalf of the whole devteam I would like to wish all our friends, customers and other people following our project all the best for 2017!

And I would also like to use the opportunity to share some news with you:

Last week we had our 2nd 'DevTeam Summit' in Athens. It was a little bit different this year compared with last year. First Fabrice could not attend because of health issues for a relative. And secondly it was cold, very cold. We had snow in Athens !

We worked a lot this week but also had some time for touristic attractions, as you can see in the image here.

One of the things we acomplished is that we finished the work on the Vulcan compatibility in the compiler. We were able to successfully compiler the complete Vulcan SDK including all kind of dirty tricks that are used in this SDK without code changes.

To be honest: we had to make a couple of changes, because our compiler found a few problems in the Vulcan SDK. If you ever wondered why drag and drop in the GUI classes is not working properly in Vulcan, then we have found the reason: there is code missing because of a typo in a define in the source code.

We also discussed our future plans for X# and you can expect updates on this website in the next couple of weeks.

As you can expect we will now pickup the work on the X# runtime, which will consist of a set of runtime functions, xBase datatypes RDDs, Macro compiler and more.

We expect to be able show you a lot of this at the XBase Future conference in Cologne end of April.

Will we see you there ?

 statues

 

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Earlier this year, around the conference in Cologne, we have published a roadmap in which we told you about our plans and what we wanted to deliver in 2016. In this week before Christmas, with winter on our doorsteps it is time to look back and see what we have achieved.

As we all now, predicting the future is very difficult. Who whould have predicted that Donald Trump would be the next president in the US?

So we were wrong in our predictions about the progress of X# too.  But we are on the right track, and we are the only XBase dialect that is making great progress every month.

What we did achieve in the 15 months behind us is:

  • A fully functional core dialect compiler based on the Roslyn source, that can compile everything that you can find in C# 6 with an XBase language syntax.
  • Many new features have been added to the xBase language, such as LINQ, Anonymous types, support for Asynchronous operations, creating generics etc. You only have to look at the pearls section in our forums to see proof of that. Every niche corner in the LINQ area in our product is being tested at length by Phil, and it simply works. Other customers have used other new features and we have received a lot of positive response on the new features
  • The support for the VO and Vulcan specific datatypes and language constructs is also almost finished. Last week we have added some missing features, such as support for PCALL() to call native Win32 functions through a pointer in an external DLL. Not something that you use in your everyday development but it is used in some inhouse libraries as well as in the VO SDK. So we decided that add that to our language, to make the migration from VO and Vulcan as smooth as possible.
    "Normal" VO and Vulcan applications compile fine now with X#.  We have done that ourselves and we got some very positive feedback from our customers who have also successfully migrated apps.
  • We have working Visual Studio integration in both Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2017. We are very proud that we were one of the original "sim ship partners" (the last one in the alphabetical list)that released their support for Visual Studio 2017 on day one.
  1. XSharp Beta 8a
  2. News Server Back Online
  3. XSharp Beta 8
  4. News server is down

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