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More than a year ago, we have published our first development Roadmap for the X# project. This new roadmap continues the tradition and describes what our plans for 2017 are.

Click here for a PDF with this document which also looks back at what we have achieved in 2016

Our plans for 2017

You will not be surprised that the open items from our roadmap for 2016  are still on the to do list for 2017. Some of the things on our to list:

• Improved Visual Studio support:
  • Nuget support
  • Editors for the VO Binaries
  • Support for other VS subsystems, especially those that are based on T4 templates.
  • “Intellisense” features for the editor, such as completion lists, parameter tips, Goto definition etc
  • Class browser and Object browser support
  • Debugger support for Globals and X# expressions
    
    
• Create the X# runtime, so you no longer need the Vulcan Runtime to run your apps that use RDDs and the VO SDK classes. Our intention is not only to replace the Vulcan runtime, but also to improve it.
  After all, we have done this before, so we can do it again, but then better!
  • Thread Safe runtime and RDD system
  • Runs on AnyCPU
  • Support Runtime Macros AND scripting (our macro compiler will support the complete language!)
  • Portable where possible. Unfortunately, there are many areas (IO related mostly) that can’t be completely portable
    
    
• Add support for an extra xBase language. At this moment, we are considering to add support for (x)Harbour. The (x)Harbour community is very active and seems to be the most interesting target audience.
  
  

We are proud to announce the release of XSharp Beta 9.
This beta mainly focuses on bug fixes and compatibility With this build we consider the VO and Vulcan support completed: the complete Vulcan SDK compiles as well as 99.9% of the 3rd party products, such as ClassMate, ReportPro, bBrowser and Vn2Ado. You should have no problems compiling your Vulcan code with this build of X#.

Many changes to the compiler have been released before as Beta 8a and Beta 8b. We have made some more changes since beta 8b mostly as a result of your feedback, for which we are very grateful.

This build also includes updated Visual Studio integration. Unfortunately not with Code completion and other editor features, but we did make quite some changes to the build system and project system. Not all of these are directly visible, but we fixed some glitches, especially with regard to dependent items, resource compilation, the error list etc. We have now also enabled all the VO compatibility compiler options in the project properties dialog.
And if you are wondering "where is my intellisense": we have decided to delay the Code completion support until the next build because we were not completely satisfied with it.

You will also find quite some changes in the documentation. All of the compiler options are documentation now, and we have included a list of the most common error numbers and messages.

Today we are uploading both a build for our Friends Of XSharp (FOX) subscribers and a public build. This public build is identical to the FOX build but does not include the optimized version of the compiler.

Last but not least: our special 30% discount on the price of a FOX subscription was expiring this week. We have decided to extend this price until February 15th. Click here to subscribe now

We are proud to announce that a new prerelease version of the X# compiler is available for download for our FOX subscribers.
You can find the ZIP file with the new compiler in the prerelease downloads folder on this website.

With this build you can compile the Vulcan SDK without changes, except for some obvious errors in the Vulcan SDK that Vulcan did not find! One of our team members will write a blog article about these errors, since you may have similar problems in your code.

We consider the Vulcan Compatibility of the compiler nearly finished with the current state of the compiler. All Vulcan code should compile without problems now. Of course the real test is with compiling and running YOUR source code.

Please try this version of the compiler with as much of your code as possible and let us know which compile time and which runtime problems you find.

The next builds of the compiler will focus on bug fixing and adding some VO compatibility options such as UDCs, VO compatible DEFINES, VO compatible numeric conversions etc.

The next full build of the product (Beta 9) will contain this new compiler and improved Visual Studio support and is expected a few weeks from now.

For those interested, here is a summary of the changes in the compiler since Beta 8:

• Added support for PCall and PCallNative
• Full support for INIT procedures. We also added EXIT procedures.
• Added compatibility command line options /ppo, .showincludes, /vo1, /vo6
• Changed several method resolution strategies. Calls without object/self prefix will resolve to functions first and when no function is found then it will look for instance methods
• Added support for DEFAULT TO, ACCEPT, WAIT and QUIT commands
• Allow multiple indexed properties per type and allow to use the indexer name, such as the string:Chars collection
• Code generation has been optimized for several language constructs
• Debugger step information has been improved for a better debug "experience".

The full list of changes is included in the ZIP but also available as download in the General section on this website.

If you are not a FOX subscriber and want to test this new compiler with your code: sign up now.