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Progress report April 12

: 12 April 2017

You have not seen any progress reports here for the last 2 weeks, so it is time to write something.

Of course the development team is busy preparing for the conference in Cologne (April 25-27, you can stilll register!). It is going to be an exciting event:

Fabrice will show X# code running on a another platform (Rasberry Pi)
Nikos is going to show scripting support for X#. With that you will probably be able to run X# script files from the command line and/or include X# script code (read from external files for example) in your app. That would be an ideal solution for data driven applications.The scripting support is also the foundation for our X# macro compiler.
Finally Robert will talk about .Net Core, .Net Standard and Windows Universal and show X# apps that work on all three of them.
With X# you are no longer tied to the Microsoft platform, but you will be able to run your apps on Linux, IOS and Android as well.

Of course we have not only prepared for the conference. Some new features were added to the VS integration and the compiler and they have also both become a little faster. More about that short before Cologne.

Finally we have included a new customer example on the Customer examples webpage.

New customer examples

: 26 March 2017

Frank Mariate has been so kind to share some images from apps he has developed with X#. You can find these in the Examples section on this website.

He will be demonstrating his apps during the "Application Show" at the XBase Future conference in Cologne as well.

It is not too late to register.

XSharp Beta 10a

: 23 March 2017

We have uploaded a new compiler for our FOX subscribers to the prerelease area on this website. This interim build fixes a couple of issues found by our subscribers in beta 10.

The most important change is the way how single quoted literals are handled:

In earlier builds a single quoted literal of 1 character was always treated as a character constant. Beta 10 would treat the single quoted literal always as a string constant and then try to detect the place where it was used and convert it to a character constant when needed. Unfortunately this was not working the way it should

So the original behaviour from before Beta 10 has been restored.
Some suggestions have been made on how to change this behaviour for a future build, and we are looking into this.

Other changes:

XSharp Beta 10

: 15 March 2017

We are pleased to announce that XSharp Beta 10 has been released to our FOX subscribers today.
This beta contains many new features and works together with Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2017.

Some of the highlights of this build:

Support for User Defined Commands in the preprocessor, including Function style Defines
Many improvements in the Visual Studio integration.
A new 'ASTYPE' keyword, which works just like the 'as' keyword in C#. So it combines a type check and an assignment in one statement
Full support for VO style DEFINEs The type specication is now completely optional.
Some bug fixes
Performance improvements for compiling assemblies with large numbers of defines and/or (_DLL) functions

For a complete list of changes look at the version history in the documentation on this website.

Our next build is scheduled around end of April, short before the XBase.Future converence in Cologne.

News from the XSharp team

: 06 March 2017

VS 2017

Tomorrow, March 7 is the 20^th anniversary of Visual Studio and the launch of Visual Studio 2017.
X# is ready for the event and one of the launch partners. You can watch the launch event online at this link.
To celebrate the 20^th anniversary we have decided to extend the 30% discount on our Friends Of XSharp (FOX) subscription for another 3 months. Click here to subscribe to our FOX program with 30% discount.
If you are interested in offers from other launch partners, look here.

xBase.Future 2017

We are approaching the dead line for the “Early Bird” price for the xBase.Future conference in Cologne on April 25-27. Register now and qualify for the discount

Beta 10

We expect to release X# Beta 10 by the end of this week. This new build has some exciting new features, especially in the area of the Visual Studio integration (2015 & 2017). We have added support for Class and Member dropdowns, Collapsible blocks in the editor (for #regions, types, members, block statements etc), code completion, intellisense errors in the error list and editor and info tips. It is not perfect yet, but we will continue to work on this in the coming months.
In the image below you see some of these new features in action.

intellisense

We have also added UDC support to the preprocessor, so almost all your “old” Clipper and Visual Objects UDCs will work with X#. You can even use the old @ SAY .. GET commands in your code, if you want, as long as you map these to meaningful function calls.
In fact we are working with a customer to migrate a Clipper/Harbour application that is full of these commands to X# !
And the good thing is: the X# Visual Studio Language integration is "smart" enough to recognize your UDC keywords and color them as if they are built-in keywords.