Introduction - CAPITAL Software (XHarbour)

[WillNitschke]

Hello my name is Will Nitschke. I've been a dBase II, III, Foxbase, Clipper and XHarbour developer of commercial business management software since the 1980's. I am still maintaining and updating our software to this day, which as you can work out, started life in the 1980's. I started young, so I'm "only" 55.

In my opinion our products are right up there in terms of quality and functionality although we are not well known. The company website is:

www.capitaloffice.com.au

Anyway, I am contemplating a transition from our XHarbour base system to X#. For this we are going to need:

1. A mostly XHarbour compatible language.
2. A DBF/CDX RDD and also connectivity to ACE / Advantage Server for same.
3. A good GUI framework.
4. Something that can render PDF files and Excel spreadsheets.
5. A charting library
6. A barcoding library.
7. Some kind of 'word processor' control.
8. A SQLRDD

I presume X# covers 1-2. And I can acquire suitable .NET packages for 3-7.

The elephant in the room is the SQLRDD. I've observed XBase++ have a PostGreSQL RDD that they claim is 100% compatible with DBF navigational syntax and offers reasonable performance. I'm not keen on migrating to XBase++ however as that basically takes us mostly to where we are already.

I also suspect a generic SQLRDD that supports "all" (or many) SQL engines out there would likely offer poor performance and not be commercially acceptable... The need for a SQLRDD here would be as a 'bridge' until we could fully migrate to SQL 'proper' code. If we could find a reasonably compatible SQLRDD with reasonable performance, we could always re-write the sections of our app where the compatibility and/or performance was not of an acceptable level. But that's not practical for us to do right away with hundreds of thousands of lines of code to deal with.

I suppose the tricky part for us is it's not practical to disappear for 2 years and then release a native SQL app... We still need to release updates and minor features as we transition.

Anyone's thoughts on all this would be welcome. Thanks!

[robert]

Will,
Your message was overlooked, but has now been approved.

Robert

[wriedmann]

Hi Will,
welcome here!
Although I'm not a XHarbour developer, but long time Clipper/VO/X# programmer, I will try to answer your questions I feel I can answer.

1. A mostly XHarbour compatible language.
2. A DBF/CDX RDD and also connectivity to ACE / Advantage Server for same.

of course X# can do that for you, and AFAIK the compatibility to XHarbour should be high. The preprocessor han help you a lot, and AFAIK Robert and Chris have done some Harbour migration, and they are very helpful.
If you see that X# is a viable alternative for you, consider to join the FoX program to support the development and to have ever better support from the team.

3. A good GUI framework.

if we leave alone the GUI that comes from VO, in .NET you have basically two choices: Windows Forms or WPF (ok, there is also WinUI 3, but currently I don't would like to consider it to be maintained as long as WPF or Windows Forms).

4. Something that can render PDF files and Excel spreadsheets.
5. A charting library
6. A barcoding library.
7. Some kind of 'word processor' control.

personally I would look at the Syncfusion tools. I'm using there RTF control and their Word library, and I'm really happy with their support.

8. A SQLRDD

this is something that is planned for X# by the development team, and the plan is to have some prerelease running for the end of the year.
You may find some details on this page (published about a year ago): https://www.xsharp.eu/articles/what-s-cooking
If you have question, feel free to ask!
Wolfgang

[moeller.os]

Hi Will,
We have had very good experiences with devexpress universal subscription. Nice PDF Rendering, Wordprocessing, Excel, Charting an so on.
We use the Devart component as the database driver for PostgreSQL. Very comfortable!
Here is our story:
https://www.xsharp.eu/links/examples/eurekafach-net

Best regards.
Uwe

[WillNitschke]

Wolfgang, Uwe,

Thank you very much for your detailed replies. I'm going to have to read Uwe's "our story" several times at least.

At this stage I am firmly in the tyre kicker camp. I began working with Visual Studio Code for the first time today, just to get used to the editor tool. There are some frustrations here but also some cool innovations. I will gradually experiment with VS and X# as time permits. Mainly as a curiosity thing for now. I would definitely sign up for the FoX program if I got serious. I have a scheduling type application which ships with the ERP applications and that would be the most straightforward to convert to .NET if I moved forward, as it would serve as a proof of concept for me. I'm not going to put pressure on myself at this stage. I'm going to look at this strictly as a "hobby" project for the foreseeable future.

Thanks again for the feedback.

[wriedmann]

Hi WIll,
maybe you can look at XIDE instead of Visual Studio - that should make it easier to start.
Later, when you are sure about what you are doing you can always switch.
Wolfgang
P.S. I'm doing mainly WPF development, but exclusively with XIDE and code based, not XAML based

[robert]

Will,

At this stage I am firmly in the tyre kicker camp. I began working with Visual Studio Code for the first time today, just to get used to the editor tool. There are some frustrations here but also some cool innovations. I will gradually experiment with VS and X# as time permits. Mainly as a curiosity thing for now. I would definitely sign up for the FoX program if I got serious. I have a scheduling type application which ships with the ERP applications and that would be the most straightforward to convert to .NET if I moved forward, as it would serve as a proof of concept for me. I'm not going to put pressure on myself at this stage. I'm going to look at this strictly as a "hobby" project for the foreseeable future.

Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio are different products.
The oldest of the two is Visual Studio, and X# provides full integration in this environment.
VS Code is a newer tool, and is platform independent. It is basically an advanced editor that can be configured (with extensions) to support various languages. We do not have X# integration for VS code (yet).

Robert

[VR]

Hi Will,

quick side note to Roberts comment about Visual Studio Code (aka VSCode). There is a VSCode Extension that adds a simple syntax highlighting for X# to VSCode. So you can use VSCode to look at X# code and do some quick editing (but no code completion, compiling, ...).

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/it ... sharp-lang

Volkmar

[WillNitschke]

Thanks Robert, I'm aware of that. I assumed, however, given that the on-line doc's frequently reference VS and VS Code simultaneously, that there is some overlap in terms of functionality. (Maybe I'm wrong.) Even though I'm a Clipper/xHarbour developer with over 30 years of development experience, learning a new platform is going to involve a lot of baby steps for me at the start...

[WillNitschke]

Thanks for that Volkmar. I wasn't aware there was an X# extension but to be honest I didn't look. I did look for an xHarbour extension and found one, and have been playing with that. The syntax highlighting for that looks very good. I am assuming that there would be a lot of overlap with X# here. But if I started to seriously play around with X# I think I would try to work with it from within VS proper. I would hope these extensions work both in the VS IDE and in VS Code. But I have not checked yet.