Two and a half week ago we announced a new build, and we have not released it yet, so we think it is time to fill you in on the details about what is going on.
The new build was almost ready a week ago, and then Microsoft released new builds of Visual Studio 2017 (15.3 and 15.3.1).
Unfortunately there are some breaking changes in this build that may result in Visual Studio locking up when you build a XSharp project. That is not good. We have heard about other project systems with similar effects. The problems seem to be related to changes in MsBuild.
Some of you will say that this is "typically Microsoft", but we strongly disagree with that:
We have had a very pleasant and smooth experience with the integration of our project system in VS 2017, from the early builds since April 2016 until last week.
At this moment we are investigating how to resolve the issue, so we can release an update that does work inside Visual Studio 2017. It is difficult to say how long that will take.
For now we strongly recommend NOT to update Visual Studio 2017 when you don't have to.
If you are running Visual Studio 2015 you should not experience any problems.
The good news is that we have had the time to add some more features to the VS integration in the last week. You can also expect support for editing VO Menu binaries as well as a first implementation (but not completely finished) of smart indent.
I know this is a horrible thing to ask, but have you got any approximate timescale now on when the X# runtime and RDDs will be released (even as beta)?
I'm working in C#, but there's a critical bit of my latest project that needs to lift data out of a legacy VO system. I'm kludging it with ADS local server at the moment, but it just doesn't work very well for what we need, so at some point I'd like to use X# for this component. I know I could use the Vulcan runtimes, but I just don't want to get involved in that.
We won't be releasing this software until well into next year, but I'm getting a bit held up at the moment by the problems that ADS is giving us in bringing data across from the old DBF files. We won't be using X# except for this bit as it's already well advanced in C#, but I can probably persuade the people I'm contracting with to pay for a FOX subscription if we can take advantage of the new RDDs to solve this one critical issue.
Thanks
Nick
Yes indeed a horrible question.
The first RDD that we are working on is the Advantage RDD because it combines both DBFNTX and DBFCDX and we got some requests for it. It is also not likely that SAP will build one for X# (I doubt that they have heard of us). We will be using the ACE API that is also used in the RDD for Vulcan and VO.
I expect this RDD and the supporting runtime around Nov 1. Some Runtime functions will still be missing then (most likely the "unmanaged" stuff such as MemAlloc etc). But it should be enough to run a normal app.
The first release will also include VO compatible GUI Classes, RDD Classes, SQL Classes and System classes. Some of these will be straight ports of the VO code from CA. Others (GUI and SQL) will be new, based on .Net classes. GUI will be using Winforms internally, SQL will be using Ado.Net internally. For both of these libraries (GUI and SQL) I already have a version that works with Vulcan.
Robert
Nick
Wolfgang