Already 3 weeks have passed since the conference in Germany and it is time for an update.
The conference was a big success. At first it looked like the number of attendees were going to be disappointing, but you have all waited until the last moment for signing up. The number of attendees was larger than last year, so we are making progress ! Next years conference has already be planned for April 16-18. Block the date in your calendar.
Three of our team members were present at the conference. I (Robert) would like to mention two sessions in particular because I thought they were very impressive:
Fabrice showed how he created a standard Winforms app on his windows computer and was able to (xcopy) deploy it to a Linux machine and to a Raspberry Pi running Debian with ZERO code changes. Both machines were running Mono and his apps run smoothly (albeit a little slow on the Raspberry Pi).
He also accessed a MySql database on his desktop from both the Linux machine and the Raspberry PI and was able to control a external USB device from both the Windows machine as well as from the Rapberry PI with zero code changes. Very impressive.
At the xBase.Future conference this week we have announced several things that we like to share with you as well:
The first GA release of X# is expected in the coming months
This first release will come with:
- The compiler
- The VS Integration for VS 2015 and 2017
- Tools to migrate VO applications to X#
- Tools to migrate Vulcan.NET applications to X#
- Full support for the .NET Framework 2.0 - 4.7, as wel as many other frameworks, such mono, Xamarin etc.
- Full support for Vulcan.NET 3.0 and 4.0 runtimes and RDDs
- X# applications will run on all platforms that support .Net framework (windows, mono) when compiled for AnyCpu of when compiled for a compatible processor (x86, X64, Arm)
Later in 2017 you can expect
- The X# Runtime with support for most xBase RDD formats, runtime functions, thread safe etc.
- A Macro compiler that is based on the X# scripting support that we have demonstrated during XBase.Future. The macro compiler will support weakly typed an strongly typed codeblocks, and will not only be restricted to compiling expressions but will also support statement (such as for next, foreach etc).
- The X# visual studio integration will be extended with support for .Net Core projects, .Net Standard projects, Universal Windows projects an so called "shared" projects
A revised 'roadmap' document will be published at this website in the coming weeks.
Finally
A new public beta (Beta 11) of X# is available for download for free from the downloads section on this website,
Hi to all,
just a quick note to told you that XBase Future 2017 Conference has started today in Cologne.
We had the first presentations this morning, with a very interesting session by Michael Fischer and Robert van der Hulst; a lot of people and new faces...Great !
Myself, I've already done a session about XSharp Everywhere, with an application consuming some MySQL-data as a client with some Windows Forms, and running the same way on Windows 10, Ubuntu 16.04 and Raspberry PI with Raspbian Pixel... without ANY Change !
Now, Robert is talking about our OpenSource model, and all stuff around program management, licences, code sharing, ...
Fabrice
We are pleased to announce that XSharp Beta 11 has been released to our FOX subscribers today.
Tomorrow at the XBase.Future conference in Cologne we will also demonstrate this new version.
This beta contains many new features and works together with Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2017.
Some of the highlights of this build:
- We fixed some reported compiler issues and optimized the preprocessor
- Many improvements in the Visual Studio integration, such as Brace Matching, Peek definition and more
- The speed of the background parser inside Visual Studio has been improved
For a complete list of changes look at the version history in the documentation on this website.
A public version of this build will be available later this week.
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.