XSharp progress report April 2016

Easter is only just one week behind us and we are already making good progress in a couple of areas:

Compiler

We have started to work on the "Bring Your Own Runtime" (BYOR) support.

So far the compiler recognizes the standard VO/Vulcan datatypes such as ARRAY, FLOAT, DATE etc. and maps these to the types inside the supplied Vulcan Runtime DLLs. Of course you need to bring the runtime for this. That is why we call it BYOR !
The compiler also correctly recognizes literal dates, literal symbols, literal floats, literal arrays etc.
Function calls in the Vulcan Runtime are resolved as well. The good thing is that X# will accept runtime DLLs from various versions of Vulcan. You do not need Vulcan 4, X# will also accept Vulcan 3 runtime DLLs, and most likely also Vulcan 2 DLLs.

In the rest of april we will implement the more "exotic" areas of the BYOR support and the VO/Vulcan dialects, such as the support for Clipper calling convention, VOSTRUCTS, UNIONS, the PSZ type, workarea access , the macro compiler etc.

Visual Studio Integration

We have had some set back in this area, but that has been resolved: we could not get the Winforms and WPF designers to work in our  project system which we have based on the new Common Project System (CPS) from Microsoft.
So we decided to switch back to the "good old" Managed Project Framework (MPF), with which we have ample experience.
Now both forms editors are working as expected. We have also added a Code parser (needed for the Winforms editor) and a CodeGenerator (needed for both tools).
We need to merge some of our code changes from the CPS version of the project system to the MPF version but that should not be too complicated

Come and meet us at the xBase.Future conference in Cologne two weeks from now. We will show you all the new stuff there!


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