Winter is coming

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.

End of this week we will deliver a Christmas build that will have 99,9 % working Vulcan Runtime support, so our "Bring Your Own Runtime" will be finished with that and after that we will focus on delivering our own runtime and support for new XBase dialects

Short after Christmas we will have our annual Devteam Summit in Athens. We will also discuss the plans for 2017 there and a new roadmap will be published after our meeting.

Some of the things we have planned for 2017 are:

• Our own thread safe and portable runtime, including thread safe RDD system, Macro compiler, Class libraries etc.
• More features for the Visual Studio integration
• New language features (that you can also find in C# 7 and VB 7 for Visual Studio 2017) , such as Tuples, Pattern Matching, Deconstruction, Local Functions, Ref Return values and more.
• Support for new xBase dialects.

And yes we can still use your support for this. We were very pleased this month to see that almost all of our early FOX subscribers from last year have resubscribed. That is proof for us that we are on the right track! We would love to have you on board as well.

Not just because that would help to fund the X# development, but we also provide excellent support for your existing VO and Vulcan code. We really loved the quote on the Vulcan newsgroup where the author wrote:

For us that kind of support is normal.

We hope to be able to welcome you on board as well. Christmas time is the right moment to convert good intentions into actions: we have a special offer for our subscription with a 30% discount that is valid until end of January.