xsharp.eu

Hello X# community!

My name is Dimitar. I'm developing web applications with Visual FoxPro and West Wind Web Connection for 15+ years already. Very interested in X# project - what you have done so far is incredible. Great work!

I'm entirely on VFP dialect (didn't even know VO, Clipper etc exists lol) and wanted to say hello and that I'll be watching the progress of X#. I'm currently working for a large international company with headquarter in US and our VFP code base is 20+ years old.

Having said I'm doing web development only, I'm not interested in any Desktop apps with VFP/X# so anything related to that I just ignore. I'm almost entirely focused on working with DBFs at present so I have some questions:
- is the speed of reading/writing to DBF files compatible to the speed of VFP?
- are you thinking about maintaining your own Unicode-enabled DBF files (even if they are not backwards compatible to VFP)
- is it possible to work with large tables (>2GB)
- is Rushmore optimization available in X#
- compatibility with all important string/date/time/number-related function in VFP including calculate, sum
- being able to create cursors/tables, apply plain indexes and indexes based on expressions
- being able to execute macro substitution (to some degree)
- full compatibility with SELECT... query statements with cursors and tables
- ability to reference managed and unmanaged DLLs
- what about web API apps with X#?

Thanks and happy coding!
Dimitar

Hi Dimitar,

Hello from a neighbor (Greece)! Thanks for your nice words, and to answer some of your questions:

- compatibility with all important string/date/time/number-related function in VFP including calculate, sum

That's the plan. Most should be already there and compatible. If some are missing or not fully compatible with VFP, we expect people to report that so we can fix it. Of course everybody is also very welcome to contribute!

- being able to execute macro substitution (to some degree)

Yes, that's supported.

- ability to reference managed and unmanaged DLLs

Yes, you can use both.

- what about web API apps with X#?

Some people have created web apps in X# since a long time ago, if you need suggestions on how to, please ask!

I will let Mr.Data (Robert) answer the dbf related questions. Regarding speed, the latest (2.7) release includes a great improvement on speed for dbf files opened exclusively, it should bring it close to VFP. Later performance improvements on shared dbf access will follow as well. But speed can never be 100% as fast as in VFP, because managed code always introduces some overhead.

Dimitar,

- Yes we are planning to support Unicode enabled DBF field types.
- You can work with tables > 2 Gb. CDX files > 2 Gb are not supported due to the fact that internally they contain 32 bit pointers
- We have no Rushmore (yet)
- Embedded SQL is not supported (yet)
- Creating tables / cursors with a "CREATE TABLE" or "CREATE CURSOR" statement is not available yet. You can create tables and cursors with the DbCreate() function which takes a table structure as array. We are planning to add support for CREATE TABLE and CREATE CURSOR and some other VFP DDL commands (ALTER TABLE, DROP TABLE) in the next build.

Robert

Hi Robert,

Well, you made my day! Thank you.

Dimitar