Last week's online demo of new features in XSharp 2.4 has been well received. Not that we stressed the Ms Teams Live servers, no way, but there was anough attendence, and also the recorded session on YouTube has been watched enough, so we are thinking of doing something like that more frequently.
One thing that we did not like ourselves is that the Ms Teams Live event has a built in delay, which makes it hard to do an interactive event. We are therefore considering to do something similar this week but with another platform: Zoom.
And yes, we are aware of the fact that Zoom sessions are difficult to secure, but our intention is not to have a secure session but to reach as many people as possible, so that is in fact a good think for us <g>.
Last weeks session also focused on new features in the VFP area, however this week we would like to discuss more general topics that are useful to developers in all X# dialects.
We have a few ideas about topics that we could talk about, but we're open for your input of course. Below is a list of suggestions that we came up with ourselves. These suggestions can be divided in 2 groups: compiler/language tips/tricks and runtime tips/tricks
Compiler/Language
- IS Var
- Special Out declarations: Out VAR Id, OUT Id as Type, OUT NULL
- Show how we now don't longer need to use version resources but how the version info is generated from assembly attributes (and how you can switch back to the old behavior)
- Show #pragma warnings and #pragma options
- Passing variables by reference to untyped functions
Runtime
- Inspect runtime state, workareas etc inside VS for the time being (as long as we don't have a workarea window).
- Workarea events and how to use them for logging
- The RddWrapper class that can be used to monitor and intercept the RDD behavior.
- Register code to resolve duplicate functions/methods at runtime with the macro compiler (SetMacroDuplicatesResolver)
- Register your own code to intercept the behavior of the File() function (RegisterFileSearch)
- The new DbDataTable() and DbDataSource() in combination with "normal" RDDs to link data to a Windows Forms or WPF window
We know this list is too long for one session, so please let us know where we should start this week. And please also lets us know if you have other ideas.
A link for this weeks session will be shared later.