X# Summit, Memmingen, Oct 6-7 2022. Information

X# Summit Memmingen 2020

Introduction

In October 2022 we are organizing our first European conference in years. We first tried to do this in 2020, but due to the international Covid crisis that event had to be cancelled.

Since we are a small open source project and we have limited financial resources, we have chosen to organize this as a relatively low budget event. We have also chosen a location in the south of  Germany, so developers from Switzerland, Austria and North Italy are also able to come with a reasonable travel time.

The main audience for this event is XSharp developers with  VO/Vulcan background. However we will also spend ample time on the other dialects.

We will present the current state of the X# development and show how to migrate your apps to XSharp. We will also discuss the internals of X# and how you can extend X#. Finally we will discuss our future plans, such as our support for next versions of .Net and will show some of the work in progress

With the help of our local partner Karl Faller we have selected a venue for the event.

This summit is structured to encourage open and facilitated face-to-face discussion and idea sharing amongst all attendees. Refreshments will be provided all day with scheduled lunch and snack breaks.

Location

The event will take place at the following hotel:

   Hotel Weisses Ross       Hotel Weisses Ross
Kalchstr. 16
87700 Memmingen
Germany
https://www.hotelweissesross.de/

Speakers

 

Speaker Bio

Wolfgang Riedman

Wolfgang Riedmann is the founder of the small software house Riedmann GmbH in Meran, South Tyrol , Italy, specialized in individual software development.

After working in Cobol on a mainframe, he started to work in Clipper, and then in VO starting with the long awaited prerelease. When X# was presented, he put in production the first small applications written in this language, and today more than the half of ist work time is done in X# using XIDE.

Wolfgang wrote also some articles in the Software Development Techniques journal, and spoke also on some VO and X# conferences.

Living in Italy, but with German mother language, he also has connection in both the German and the Italian X# and VO community.

Meinhard Schnoor

Meinhard is working as a self employed IT consultant. He has studied computer sciences and has over 40 years of experience in the area of software development. Starting his programming career with Pascal, Assembler and Cobol, he adopted the xBase languages beginning with Ashton Tate's DBase environment and moved early to the Clipper compiler in summer 87.
In these years he began to become an expert in Clipper 5.x and then CA's Visual Objects Environment and it's successors. Nowadays he's mainly working with Microsoft's .Net universe, Visual Studio and #X as well as C#.

Andrej Terkaj

Andrej Terkaj, Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering , born and living in Slovenia..

I started my professional career in 1980 as a software project manager in Iskra Delta, the largest Slovenian computer company to date.

In 1987 I founded private company Task Ltd, where I was not only the owner, but mainly a software developer.

After more than 30 active years in the development of software for the logistics and maintenance sector (Computer Maintenance Management System Radix ) I closed Task Ltd. in 2018 as my retirement was approaching.

I am a long-time VO developer, since the very beginning of Visual Objects, and before that I used other programming languages: Nantucket Clipper, Ashton Tate dBase, Borland Turbo Pascal and Fortran.

Within the Visual Objects programming language I also used bBrowser and VO2Ado to be able to successfully manage data for different relational databases, most of them MS SQL Server

I've taken programming as part of my life, so now I'm even more immersed in modern programming tools.

Fabrice Foray

After a first encounter with personal computing and a Tandy TRS-80 in the early 80's, it was the use of Clipper 86 that led me to xBase languages. I have been teaching computer science in France for more than 30 years, especially with C++, Java and C# languages, and at the same time I continued the xBase adventure with CA-Visual Objects, Vulcan.Net and finally XSharp!

Nikos Kokkalis

Nikos Kokkalis studied Computer Engineering at the Democritus University of Thrace, and there also earned his doctorate. He has worked as an independent software developer since 1996 for Anadelta Software and Intracom Telecom. Since 2016 he is an employee of Intracom Telecom. During 2011 - 2015 he was a member of the GrafX development team. Since Sept. 2015 he has been a member of the XSharp development team.

 

Robert van der Hulst

Robert van der Hulst (The Netherlands) has been part of the IT industry since the 80's. He started developing applications in DOS with dBase, Clipper and FoxBase, C and Assembler. Later he developed applications for Windows and .Net with C/C++, Visual Objects, Vulcan.Net, Visual FoxPro, and C#.

Robert has created several 3rd party components for Visual Objects and Vulcan developers and has been part of the Visual Objects and Vulcan.Net development team, and worked there on the compiler, IDE, runtime and RDD systems.

In 2015, Robert founded the XSharp (X#) Project , together with Fabrice Foray (France), Nikos Kokkalis (Greece) and Chris Pyrgas (Greece). They were all colleagues from the former Vulcan.Net development team who decided there was a need for an open source implementation of XBase for .Net.

 

Sessions

 

Wolfgang Riedmann
SQL Data Access in .Net

Often programmers think that SQL is SQL and that there are no big differences. Unfortunately this is not correct, and since I have programming experience with several big SQL database engines, I will first present an quick overview of some of the most used products and their strengths and licenses (open source and commercial).

Then I will show some differences than affect the programming with these and that need to be respected when working with them.

As last part, I will show an approach how to build libraries with a simple common interface that is able to mask some of the differences between the different engines.

Of course, the sources of these libraries will be shown and will be available for download after the conference.

Andrej Terkaj
USING X# IN WEB APPLICATIONS: Blazor and X#

I am very happy with the opportunities I have to acquire the latest knowledge in software development. I have finally found the environment I have been looking for more than 10 years, so that I could at least partially use my "old Visual Objects" - tested code and move it to a web applications.

The main purpose of my talk will be to introduce you to the possibilities of web development with the X# programming language. Yes it is written correctly. X# in a web environment. It might be better to write X# and Blazor together. The Blazor environment is the one that will show us that this is also possible. There is nothing written in the literature or in the media about this. Personally, I came up with the idea of trying X# in the Blazor environment, because Blazor is based on C# and C# is based on the .NET (code name Roslyn) compiler platform. And Roslyn is a set of open source compilers and APIs not only for C# but also for X#.

I'll show a concrete example that will demonstrate a simple working application using X# Core dialect and migrate it to the Azure Service Cloud. We will show how different programming languages (from X#, C#, HTML, CSS, javascript) can interact with each other and how a small application is visible on different operating systems and devices (including Android and iOS). In this example, we will perform simple CRUD operations using different methods of accessing the SQLite database. Last but not least, we will finally demonstrate the correctness of our choice of Blazor framework in the latest MAUI environment.

My last goal for this talk is to say: it's never too late to learn new technologies. My topic will offer you the possibility or the way to use X# in apps that will look much fresher to the younger generations than the established windows forms GUI.

Now you have the chance to put on your the .Net Core big boots and try to jump as many high steps as possible.

Meinhard Schnoor
How to use X# in VO using COM Servers as SxS Components
Meinhard demonstrates how to develop COM components in X# and how to use them in Visual Objects. The main focus will be on the development of the components and best practices according to Microsoft. The second part of the session will concentrate on how to make the written components usable in VO by applying the Microsoft's side by side technology, so it will not be necessary to install these components. Instead he will demonstrate the use of manifests so these components can be xcopy deployed with you VO application.
How you should do logging and error handling in X# (.NET)
When moving your development from Visual Objects to the .Net world, you open the door to a complete new cosmos. Looking into the projects of a lot of my customers, I often see that the concept of logging is not present or at least neglected. Meinhard will show how to introduce this in your own programs, by using available packages from the .Net universe. The second part will address exception handling. Lots of X# programmers still use the mechanisms delivered by Visual Objects (Begin Sequence Recover) and ignore the new technology completely. Meinhard will show why this is not a good idea and demonstrate how to achieve this by adopting the new language constructs in X#. By applying widely accepted best practices you will learn how to enhance you error handling to the next level.
Fabrice Foray
Migrating Visual Foxpro Projects to X#

Showing VFPXPorter application; How it can move Forms & Projects of a VFP Application to XSharp, WinForms and Visual Studio projects. What changes it implies, some common troubles we may have and how to solve them.

Nikos Kokkalis
Runtime code sorcery with X#

Working with scripts in X#: taking advantage of the compiler and macro compiler.
How to script and why. Interacting with scripts. Exposing APIs and security concerns.
Analyzing code and finding problems. Code generation.
All these and more in a session about programmatically working with source code.

Robert van der Hulst
.Net Next

So far the most of us have created applications for the .Net Framework.
Parallel to the .Net Framework there are several other versions of .Net, for example .Net Standard, .Net Core, .Net 5, .Net 6 and .Net 7. There were also .Net versions for other platforms, such as Mono and Xamarin.

This session tries to put these various implementations of .Net in perspective and will show you how you can use X# for these various targets.
We will also look at the X# build system and how you can create applications for these different target platforms.

X# Runtime Advanced Tips and Tricks
During this session Robert will demonstrate some of the "new" and not very well known features that were added to the X# Runtime. Some examples are:
- Workarea Events
- Event handlers that repond to changes in settings inside the Runtime State
- Subclassing X# RDDs
- How does the X# Runtime handle multi threading. What about open workareas? What about the runtime state?
- and more
X# Development Team

Opening Session & Closing Session

 

Various customers

Application Show

During this session various customers will demonstrate the programs that they created with X# and explain some of the decisions that they have made during the migration process.

Session Schedule

Here is the (preliminary) session schedule for our summit in Memmingen, 2 weeks from now.

Thursday      
From  Until Topic Speaker
09:00 09:15 Welcome and opening X# Devteam
09:15 10:30 SQL Data Access in .Net Wolfgang
10:30 10:45 Break  
10:45 12:00 How to use X# COM Servers as SxS Components Meinhard
12:00 13:00 Lunch  
13:00 14:15 X# Runtime Advanced Tips and Tricks Robert
14:15 14:30 Break  
14:30 15:45 Runtime code sorcery with X# Nikos
15:45 16:00 Break  
16:00 17:15 Application Show Various attendees
17:15 18:30 Break + City Tour  
18:30 20:00 Dinner  
20:00 23:00 Evening program  
       
Friday      
From  Until Topic  
09:00 10:15 Converting FoxPro code to .Net Fabrice
10:15 10:30 Break  
10:30 11:45 How you should do logging and error handling in X# (.NET) Meinhard
11:45 12:00 Break  
12:00 13:15 Using X# in web applications - Blazor & X# Andrej
13:15 14:15 Lunch  
14:15 15:30 .Net Next Robert
15:30 15:45 Break  
15:45 16:45 Closing session X# Devteam

Registration

To register for this event, please send an email to info@xsharp.eu.

We have the following registration fee for the event:

Description FOX
Subscribers
Others
- Early bird (book before September 2022) 350* 400*
- Normal price (starts September1, 2022) 450* 500*
  • This includes the refreshments, lunch and dinner on the 6th and refreshments and lunch on the 7th.
  • We expect people to arrive on Wednesday October 5.
  • We have negotiated a special discounted hotel room price of EUR 90 per person per night including breakfast for a Single room. Double rooms are available at EUR 137 per night including breakfast. Local taxes may apply. You can book directly with the hotel https://www.hotelweissesross.de/. and tell them that you are part of the X# Summit group.
  • Room are available from Wednesday 5th until Saturday 8th.
  • For those attendees that are staying until Saturday 8th, we plan to go out and have dinner together on Friday 7th in a restaurant in Memmingen.
  • Please note that all prices are excluding 21% VAT for EU residents. If you register as a Company and let us know your VAT number then we will not have to charge the VAT.

 


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