It has been a while, so it is time for a progress update.
X# 2.21
At this moment we're finalizing X# 2.21 which should be presented to our beta testers in the coming week or so. This build will include some fixes for issues that were reported by our customers, and also a fix in the Visual Studio 2022 integration. This was needed because Microsoft has changed some very fundamental things in the Visual Studio editor in recent VS 2022 builds, which caused 3rd party components that were using a "legacy" language service to lose functionality, such as Format Document, Snippets and more.
In case you're wondering: we are using this "legacy" model because that's the only thing that works with VS 2017 and VS 2019 as well.
We also fixed an issue in the DBF driver to better support FoxPro tables for Multi Byte characters sets (Chinese, Japanese etc.) and to better support VO DBF files that are created in OEM mode (SetAnsi(FALSE)). And the Chinese Help file has many more translated pages.
X# 3
We are also working on X# 3. This version will support the .Net versions that came after .Net Framework. To support this, we had to update our build system and Visual Studio project support. X# 3 will also include an updated compiler that will be based on the C# 12 source. We will add support for new language features such as "Global Usings" and "File Based Namespaces". If you are missing a (recent) C# feature in X#, please let us know. Maybe you are missing "Records" or a special kind of pattern matching? With the update of the compiler, "all" we need to do is to invent a syntax that fits in the X# language.
The X# 3.0 runtime will introduce some breaking changes, so you will have to recompile your apps to work with X# 3. We will change some APIs to use 64 bit values instead of 32 bits values (such as the File IO functions) to support the larger file sizes on modern operating systems.
We also plan to release Runtime packages for X# 3 and later as NuGet Packages with assemblies for the various different platforms (.Net Framework, .Net 7, .Net 8 etc.). X# 3.0 should be available early 2025.
The X# Summit in Munich
In several weeks we will meet some of you at our summit in Munich. You can find the (preliminary) session schedule here.
The event is not sold out. We can (and would like) to add a few more of you to our list of attendees.
If you want to meet us and share your ideas about the future of the X# development, please register and join us in Munich.
