Already 3 weeks have passed since the conference in Germany and it is time for an update.
The conference was a big success. At first it looked like the number of attendees were going to be disappointing, but you have all waited until the last moment for signing up. The number of attendees was larger than last year, so we are making progress ! Next years conference has already be planned for April 16-18. Block the date in your calendar.
Three of our team members were present at the conference. I (Robert) would like to mention two sessions in particular because I thought they were very impressive:
Fabrice showed how he created a standard Winforms app on his windows computer and was able to (xcopy) deploy it to a Linux machine and to a Raspberry Pi running Debian with ZERO code changes. Both machines were running Mono and his apps run smoothly (albeit a little slow on the Raspberry Pi).
He also accessed a MySql database on his desktop from both the Linux machine and the Raspberry PI and was able to control a external USB device from both the Windows machine as well as from the Rapberry PI with zero code changes. Very impressive.
Nikos demonstrated the new XSharp Script engine. He showed how you can directly run PRGX files from the command line or how you can use XSharp Scripting from inside your program. This works like the macro compiler on steroids. Very nice.
At this moment we are finishing the last beta (12). The scripting support will be one of the items included in this beta. You can also expect improvements in the intellisense and some smaller (but not less important) changes in the compiler that make the compiler more VO compatible. For example: I just fixed a ticket where in VO you can assign a numeric variable directly to a variable that is declared as PTR without casting. In Vulcan and C# that is only allowed with an explicit cast We now allow the same thing as VO. I leave it up to you to decide if this is a smart thing to do. Some people do this (the actual example came from a 3rd party product). You can expect this beta end of next week.
The General Release of XSharp ("Anjou") is planned for June 21, so at the start of the summer.
That means that we will not be dancing naked around Stonehenge this year.
No time for that I am afraid <g>.
Stay tuned for more info
Would like to see working intellisense for generics, VARs and functions :)