TOPIC:

Chris wrote:

Dick,

Please don't turn this into another VS bashing thread though...

Will asks if he should consider XIDE or VS. What is your problem with answering that mentioning the way I see VS? Did you guys get an angry mail from Microsoft or something like that?

Dick

Hello Wolfgang,

wriedmann wrote:

XIDE shows the method in the column "Entity".

But I see only 2 entity names in the whole list.

What I miss is the exact method names, function names. It looks to me that the entity list doesn't contain that info?

Dick

Hi Dick,

ic2 wrote:

Chris wrote:

Dick,

Please don't turn this into another VS bashing thread though...

Will asks if he should consider XIDE or VS. What is your problem with answering that mentioning the way I see VS? Did you guys get an angry mail from Microsoft or something like that?

Nothing like that, and after all I also dislike VS a lot, but there's no point repeating this in every single post IMO. Everybody knows you hate it, they know I do it, too, but let's not annoy them with that 10 times a day...

.

Hello Chris,

Chris wrote:

Nothing like that, and after all I also dislike VS a lot, but there's no point repeating this in every single post IMO. Everybody knows you hate it, they know I do it, too, but let's not annoy them with that 10 times a day...
.

Ok, fair enough, but in this case Will asked what other think. I think those who dislike VS too should express that then.

Dick

Hi Dick,

But I see only 2 entity names in the whole list.
What I miss is the exact method names, function names. It looks to me that the entity list doesn't contain that info?

there are four columns that contain this information:
-

• Application - contains the application, and here you can see that the results come from at least 5 different applications
• File - contains the program file, and here I have about 20 different in my screenshot (there are a lot more)
• Class - contains the class name, in this case a class for every file
• Entity - the entity name. In this sample screenshot it may look confusing, as I use the same method name for every window to build it.

Wolfgang

Another side note... It is possible to create Extensions for Visual Studio. Here's an example for an Visual Studio Extension related to X#: github.com/InfomindsAg/XSharpPowerTools

Maybe Dick can offer Chris "a bag full of money", so that he reuses his code for the search functionality in XIDE and wraps it in a Visual Studio Extension.

Volkmar

Dick,

ic2 wrote:

Chris wrote:

Dick,

Please don't turn this into another VS bashing thread though...

Will asks if he should consider XIDE or VS. What is your problem with answering that mentioning the way I see VS? Did you guys get an angry mail from Microsoft or something like that?

Like Chris said: there is no need to repeat your point of view in every thread, even when people ask your opinion.
Your repeated complaints about VS are "poisoning" the atmosphere on the forum.

I am sure (I have heard) that this prevents others from making positive remarks about what VS can do (yes some people like VS) because they are afraid for another "VS war". These people are well aware that the issues that you have with the code editor are not VS issues but OUR issues with how VS works.

Please don't force me to put you on a black list for "trolling".

Robert

Robert,

robert wrote:

I am sure (I have heard) that this prevents others from making positive remarks about what VS can do (yes some people like VS) because they are afraid for another "VS war".

That doesn't make sense to me. I welcome positive remarks about VS, because there might be things I could do differently so I could benefit. I have actually asked for such remarks in multiple posts. And I have also written which VS features I like. I admit that I express my concerns about VS, many also present in C#, (too) often because I am confronted with it often. But far from "in every thread" or "10 times a day". I think the vast majority of my posts do not include VS and are useful contributions to the forum and the posts that do also describe relevant issues with X# in VS which you could often address.

robert wrote:

Please don't force me to put you on a black list for "trolling".

Then start with revoking my access to the betatestesters forum; I will no longer participate. Most issues I posted there were VS related so there's a good chance that an issue is accompanied by a not nice remark about VS about which you made it perfectly clear that this annoys you.

Have a great weekend.

Dick

Hi Chris,

Great, thanks for the tips.

Hi Will

You appear to be trying to tackle different things at once. My advice is to treat them separately.

Advancement of your business management software is one thing. For that those conversant with relevant coding will obviously give best advice and lead to the quickest way of doing things.

But if you are looking to the future, albeit as a hobby, understanding what is going on beneath the surface will help significantly. IMO gaining this understanding through code, as Wolfgang pointed out, is likely to take a long, long time.

The bad news is that what I will call the "computing eco-system" is extremely complex. It has always been thus, but it is only recently that its evolution has led our thinking to similarly evolve.

The good news is that you already know something that is far more complex and far reaching than a mere "computing eco-system". It is real life and the way we go about things quite naturally and in many cases without too much thought.

So, with a bit of lateral thinking, it becomes easier to contrast what we do in real-life with what electronics can be made to do in "electronic life", thereby giving us an easier route to understanding.

I will try to give you a nudge in your directions of thought, which I hope will lead you to think it through further for yourself. It is impossible to pro-actively TEACH anyone to understand - we all see things differently. Each of us must try to understand for ourselves in our own way.

In real life a look at a map will show roads crisscrossing all over the place. Bridges and so on. Obviously OK because our world is 3-dimensional. One look at the motherboard of a PC shows that the tracks or busses (equivalent to roads, lanes etc. in real life) are flat. Therefore, where roads cross on the maps any traffic on our electronic roads must wait if other traffic is passing across.

At the same time there is another self-evident truth in respect of our electronic road - it is a single bus running from one fixed point to another, the electronic traffic runs from a start point to an end point. (Start to destination). The track cannot move.

How can we tie that up to our real-life roads?

Very simply - we only need our road for a period of time of sufficient length to carry goods (data) from start to finish. In real life we may walk (say 4mph); electronically data moves at constant speed but very quickly. (Here we are talking about base speed close to the speed of light, but considerably reduced by electronic factors, still fast). Now all we have to do, conceptually at least, is move data containers in our program into start or endpoint positions.

I hope the foregoing helps you in appreciating the overall picture. Subjectively I find it is the quickest way to explain things.

It is your code that has to control things.

I hope it provides a start to useful thinking.

Terry

Terry,

Not sure what to make of your reply but thanks anyway. Unfortunately I can only do one thing at a time, so everything initially is going to be about proof of concept. I need to establish first how easy, or complex, it is to generate binaries that I can run. What the dependencies are and what the issues with dependencies may involve, and then move forward from there.

(The great thing about XHarbour apps are that you could literally drop the EXE and it's DLL's onto a new PC, specify a path setting via an .INI and the app would talk to the file server and run. Which is great if you've got a site with 50 stations. I suppose the downside is that because the app existed in virtually its own "eco-system" getting it to talk to the rest of the eco-system in more sophisticated ways always turned out to be a PIA, requiring C++ coding.)

As for the big picture stuff, I'm fine with that. I'm good at that as I've been engineering systems for 35+ years, so I've pretty much made all the mistakes that could be made, including having awareness of the more subtle ones. The devil for me with all this is going to be in the technical details.

Hi Will,
about "drop in a folder and run" is not only true for XHarbour, but also for VO and X# applications.
A development tool that requires applications have to be installed would be no choice for me (in fact, most of my applications are running directly from a shared folder, without any local files).
With .NET you can even connect to most SQL servers without any local installation and configuration.
Wolfgang

Hi Will

My reply was basically stating what you already know - that you can quite legitimately draw an analogy with real-life to gain the big picture, so at least you know what your code is aiming to do.

So in that respect it will not have helped very much.

But the whole computing eco-system is evolving, both hardware and software. The best we can do is try and get some appreciation of what is happening.

You say "I need to establish first how easy, or complex, it is to generate binaries that I can run. What the dependencies are and what the issues with dependencies may involve, and then move forward from there".

I question this approach.

Here, as in any .Net based environment you will have already moved onto a path which has simplified much of the underlying complexity of generating binaries that you can run. So, I would say, just follow it.

MS has made this a fairly easy path to follow using Visual Studio. (There is a learning curve associated with optimising, or tailoring VS to your way of doing things). But using Net 6 as a basis for desktop apps is probably best approach.

.Net is most certainly not targetted at high-performance.

It is your coding that will determine performance.

You go on to comment on C++. This is certainly the way things are going for high performance computing. C++ may well be a PIA but there is no real alternative. You'd have to learn it.


This goes hand-in-glove with "parallel programming think" using hyper threading and GPUs.

Best regards

Terry

Wolfgang,

about "drop in a folder and run" is not only true for XHarbour, but also for VO and X# applications.

That sounds very encouraging, but surely you have to at least install the .NET framework the app is built around or is that an invalid assumption?

in fact, most of my applications are running directly from a shared folder, without any local files).

I would consider that a basis (core) requirement, so that's great.

With .NET you can even connect to most SQL servers without any local installation and configuration.

I don't suppose you know if that would include PostgreSQL ?

Terry,

Given how fast modern CPU's are and also I'm expecting X# to run faster than XHarbour as code can be closer to 'native' than p-code, and on top of the fact that I'm writing business code, performance in that regard is of no concern to me. All the bottlenecks are going to come down to data access...

Hello Will,

To quickly reply your last questions: .Net Framework is part of Windows and updates with Windows. It does not require specific installation. The only thing you have to decide is which version you are going to support/use in your application properties. Basically there you have 2 supported options: the .Net Framework or .Net6. The latter is a kind of .Net rewrite supposed to replace the previous .Net Core and Framework. There are some speed and option advantages above the framework and if I am not mistaken it will be supported in the next number update of X# (3.x). However, the EOL support of these "newer" .Net versions is limited, every second version 3 years and the others 1,5 year. E.g. .Net6 released in Nov 21 is supported until Nov 24 but .Net7 expected next november is supported until May 24 only.

The last .Net Framework version is 4.8.1 (Aug 2022) and will be kept supported with Windows. Targeting a lower .Net version may be required when you use an older DLL which does not support a newer version. If that is not a consideration, targeting 4.8 you can expect the latest additions to be available. E.g. 4.8 added support for some cryptography classes which yielded an exception in earlier versions. As 4.8 was released in 2019 you can expect all Windows computers to have it. To be on the very safe side choose anything from 4.6.2 (Aug 2016). Note that I did not recommend 4.8.1 which e.g. does e.g. not support earlier Windows Server versions than 2022 and is not recommended by Microsoft (dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet-framework).

So in short: target your application (in the Properties) to anything between .Net Framework 4.6.2. and 4.8 if you want a long support and the best chance that all users will have it installed and you will be able to have your X# programming up and running by just copying your exe and the included DLL's (like those from the X# Redist directory). Like you did in Harbour.

Regarding your PostgreSQL: I don't use it myself but I understand it is used by quite a few X# programmers. Just search on it to see some messages. Johan Nel was written some interesting info about PostgreSQL.

Dick

Hi Will,
about the xcopy installation: with .NET you can do that for the client. That means that you don't need any configuration on the client PC to connect to the PostgreSQL server other than passing the correct parameters when you open the connection.
The server needs to be installed on a server machine (AFAIK there is also a manual installation procedure for the PostgreSQL server, but the start of the server process needs to be configured on the server machine, and also an eventual firewall exception rule).
The same is true also for the backup procedure - every SQL server needs also its backup procedure - a file copy alone normally is not enough.
The possibility to use .NET code to connect to various SQL servers without any local client configuration has also led me to implement COM modules in X# to be used from my VO applications for SQLite, MS SQL Server and PostgreSQL servers.
Wolfgang

Hello All

I can't help noticing that this tread has become ridiculously long, and question whether we are making best use of this forum.

As a Welcome thread it should be just that. Looking back through it it has becomme a multi-topic thread.

I have to agree with Robert, Chris and others who don't want to see Dick turn it into a VS bashing thread.

I quite agree with Dick who feels that his views on the shortcomings of VS should be communicated to newcomers here.

But the answer surely is to open new threads for topics as appropriate.

Hi Terry,

It's been more than ten days since the topic of "shortcomings of VS" has appeared in this thread, until you mentioned it again just now

.