The purpose of this article is to show some of the new features available in Xailer 2.0 and give you some guidelines of the Xailer’s future. It is possible that some of the features or guidelines indicated here will not be available at this moment or in the first release of Xailer 2.0, however, other features not mentioned here may be present in Xailer 2.0.
Our goal is to become the new Xailer 2.0 into a top professional tool, able to compete against the most important RAD tools. We believe that current version 1.9 is a fully stable and consolidated product that already can compete with other programming tools, but in order to attract programmers from other tools, we must give them everything they already have. We want that any programmer, coming from other tools don’t miss anything when they make the jump to Xailer.
To achieve this goal we are actually working to enhance the following Xailer areas:
- Contextual help on the code editor (Intellisense)
- Data modules
- Enhancements on copy & paste operations from the form editor
- Undo operations on the form editor
- Block operations within the object inspector that affect more than one control
- Report generator
- Template forms
- Assistants
- Visual integration of OCX controls on design time
- Third party controls
- MinGW compiler support
- Support of multiple projects on the IDE
- Native datasource for FireBird
- PDF generation through TCanvas class
- Visual form inheritance
In future articles we’ll explain in detail all this new Xailer’s 2.0 features.
Current registered Xailer’s users with an active subscription (with their support date not come to end), can download the current Xailer 2.0 release, this release should be treated as an Alfa version since it is a work in progress not fully finisehd. The install file can be downloaded from the following link:
http://www.xailer.com/files/xailer20alfa.exe
One of the most important enhancements of this version is that is compiled with the most recent version of xHarbour (August 3th 2008) and for this reason needs the newest xHarbour release which is incompatible with Xailer 1.9. It’s very important that you install this new xHarbour version on a different folder than the one you use for your current Xailer 1.9.
You can download the new xHarbour version from the following link:
http://www.xailer.com/files/xharboursetup2.exe
Finally, just to comment that we will really appreciate all your suggestions or comments about the new features you want to see on Xailer 2.0. We encourage you to use this same blog to do it.
Regards,
[Xailer team]