Progress report April 2025

Great, thank you for letting us know, and thank you for your continued work!

Wolfgang

wow! this version sounds great. Keep going with the hard work guys.

I would probably be the last one to use X# 3.0 anyway (all 3rd party libraries need to be recompiled and that is very likely to cause problems). But I understand the need for X# 3 to use .Net 8/9 etc which some of us would like to do (and I don't). There's however one other reason that would even more keep me from using X# 3.0: the NuGet distribution. The current installer works perfectly. In minutes, you can reinstall an older version or go back to a newer one and it all works, provided you don't store anything in the GAC.

Every NuGet distribution means trouble. I don't understand why something which works perfectly needs to be replaced with something which causes trouble. I understand that this this is company policy for large software firms. They follow the general trend towards whatever is supposed to be the standard and they don't care at all about what their users think. Other bad ideas, like storing DLL's in the GAC, can easily be avoided in X# 2 during installation and I never had to uncheck it again after I first did. Great.

So why replace something which works perfectly with something which does not? I did not expect this behaviour from X#.

Dick

Dick,

Nuget packages allow you to distribute DLLs with the same name, compiled for different target frameworks (for example .Net Framework 4.6 and .Net 9) in a single package. That simplifies things a lot.

It is also an easy way to update and deploy the runtime without having to update the compiler and/or VS integration at the same time. There is no need to an installer, you can update the package from the Package Manager inside Visual Studio.

We will most likely create a single package (for example, called XSharp.VO) that contains all the DLLs to compile for the X# VO dialect. Your app will have a single reference to XSharp.VO.

In reality, this package would probably contain only a few VO dialect specific assemblies and a reference to another nuget package that contains the common DLLs for all the XSharp dialect (like XSharp.Core, XSharp.RT and XSharp.RDD)

Hello Robert,

Thanks for explaining and I understand that it makes sense for you and also for a part of the users.

this package would probably contain only a few VO dialect specific assemblies and a reference to another nuget package

However, that all sounds even worse to me than I thought. As written, the current installer works great and as an end user I don't care if e.g. only the runtime is updated or everything. I couldn't care less about dealing with different target frameworks although I emphasize that I understand some of the users do.

I also wonder if Xide users now need VS to update their X# versions to get new versions.

I have converted some programs to make them more future proof, written a few small new programs in X# to get familiar with X# but almost all my code works just as well in VO. Wherever I used the latest technologies from Microsoft (e.g. WPF, WCF) it was not exactly a success. And most larger projects we started will remain in VO anyhow which makes it a lot easier and less frustrating to maintain.

Where other users asked for compatibility from languages added later like Foxpro or Harbour, and also about language features not present in VO, I have mainly tried to  get as much of the ease-of-use I have in VO also in X#. But despite your appreciated efforts, some (for me important) features could never be realized, either because they were too time consuming and also because it is VS you have to deal with. Maybe 80% (after considering the few advantages VS offers above VO). I consider NuGet installs a serious step back.

Just my thoughts. For me personally it doesn't matter if X# 2.23 will be the last X# version I use.

Dick