Dear Xailer users,
We are pleased to announce that we hope it will be the last publication of Xailer 3 Beta before the final departure of Xailer 3. It has been a tremendous marathon we had to run, but we believe that the work has paid off and we hope that you too can appreciate the significant improvements that have been included in Xailer.
As many of you already know Xailer 3 is a big evolution since we changed the xBase compiler to Harbour and also changed the ‘C’ compiler to MINGW. We believe the two make a perfect couple, BTW, we still support Borland BCC 5.5.
We understand how hard it is for many of you the upgrade to a new version of Xailer, and further to this Xailer 3 that has many important changes and some of them are really depth. As far as we are concerned, that is, on our code, we have tried to maintain full compatibility with Xailer 2, however, Harbour is not exactly the same as xHarbour and there are some differences. However, these differences are few and are documented on our Wiki.
From Xailer 2.7 we have been supporting the Harbour compiler and we can assure you that there are already many users who have done the migration to Harbour on their own projects. On those cases the jump to Xailer 3 will be very easy.
However, the improvements do not end there. There are many new features and some of then are very important and useful. Here we enumerate the most important:
- Complete redesign of the debugger, supporting the use of ‘Watch points’, expression evaluator, show variables value in a tooltip and even support for DLL debugging.
- Memory leak Control: When compiled in debug mode and the ‘Debug memory loss’ check box is checked in the event of any loss of memory in your application, it will be displayed in the message window when you leave application. Thanks to this great improvement, we have completely debug small suffering memory leaks on Xailer Beta 3.
- GDI resources Control:Xailer 3.0 includes a complete GDI resource manager that is shown on the IDE debugging window. This makes easy to check if our applications are loosing GDI resources, just checking the consumption opening and closing the forms.
To analyze the consumption of resources you have to look on them after few open and close form operations. It is normal, that resources grow, but these must be stabilized after a while and especially should not increase every time we open the same form repeatedly. That is a clear sign that we are losing resources. However, I advance that many Windows API controls do not destroy their resources immediately since those operations are done on another thread that can be executed later. Likewise, Xailer creates resources that are never cleared because they are constantly used, such as certain cursors, bitmaps an icons. In short, do not try to make simple arithmetic with resources consumption 😉
- Support of MariaDB database. Absolutely compatibility with MySQL and licensing smoothly
- Massive search and replace on the code editor
- Code formatter completely configurable
- Console output for user tools. This new functionality show on the message window the console output of any application
- Intellisense support with third party libraries
- New control TRunProcess (only in Enterprise version) to execute any application asynchronously.
- Ability to change standard resources used by your application. We have separated the images and literals from the standard resources used by Xailer and added five new resource sets from Xailer1.res to Xailer5.res that you can find in the LIB folder. We have also added a ‘file Xailer 1 (sample).rc‘ as a sample that you may use to create your own resource file.
Also we have corrected many problems encountered in previous Beta version we could find thanks to the important collaboration of many of you. From here, thank you very much.
The version of Harbour we did use on the previous Xailer 3 beta included small modifications necessary for our OOP engine in order to suite our needs and was therefore not possible to use with Xailer the official version of Harbour or any ‘Night build’. We were able to completely remove those modifications and therefore wen can use any Harbour version you can get right now. However, we remind you that for obvious reasons, will support only the Harbour version published by ourselves.
In the latest versions of Harbour expressions like Super:method() are no longer supported, and you must use the expression ::Super:method() instead. The new version of Xailer checks when opening a project whether the XFM files are updated to this new format, and in case not updates them. Note that this process can make your projects backward incompatible. But the solution is simple you only need to change ::Super with Super.
You may download the new Xailer 3.0 RC from our download area. You will also need the new version of Harbour+MingGW, that you may find with the name harbour32setup2.exe.
Last and most important: The update to the final version of Xailer 3 is only possible from version 2. Those users who have not upgraded from version 1 must re-purchase the full product. However, only until the day March 20, 2013 will be allowed to upgrade from Xailer one and thus can access Xailer 3 when published either before or after that date.
Regards,
[Xailer team]
