First of all, we’d like to wish you a happy new year 2009 and thank you for your confidence in Xailer that we hope it will continue in the future.

Once again, we came back with another upgrade of the future Xailer 2.0, with important new features that surely you will enjoy. But I would like to point out that this new version is completely functional and secure. We highly recommend its use on your own projects.

As soon you start using its compile multi-process compiling capability I’m sure you will not return to your actual 1.9 version because the compiling and linking process time is dramatically reduced even down to a quarter of its normal time in quad-core CPU’s. For further information on this new feature consult this article on this same blog: Compiling in turbo mode’

This new upgrade comes with important features (and a lot of minor enhancements) like:

• DLLs creation
• Final executable creation with compression
• Multiple control properties update on a single operation
• SQLite encryption
• RTF to HTML conversion
• Project import

This new version has the ability to create pcode DLLs that can include any kind of resource. This DLLs can only be used from programs written in Xailer because the pcode virtual machine only exists in the executable. This is the first step necessary to gain some other important features requested by you like third party controls, control personalization and assistants creation.

Besides this functionalities that we expect to include in Xailer in the short term, the DLL creation can be very useful for your own use. For example you can create a DLL for each module of your application, so when yo add a new feature you will only need to send that module to your client.

We didn’t have the enough time to make samples about the use of DLLs, but we expect to do it soon. By the way, we didn’t have chance to make all the tests we would liked to either, so if someone is interested on this new feature we will be very glad to help you on this since is a first priority for us that this new feature works correctly.

With this new release we’ve included a new feature that makes the use of the debugger faster and much intuitive. The compile button has now a menu to compile only the modified modules, the complete project, the creation of the final executable and the ability to toggle the debugger itself, showing a little bug on the compile button when the debugger is active. We remind you that since the first release of Xailer 2 beta, the compiler makes different sets of compiled modules with and without debugger information. This way, every time we change the compilation mode is not necessary to recompile the complete project.

The new ‘Final Excutable’ option gives you a simple way for the creation of the final executable. The IDE shows a small initial dialog to change any version information field, then pushing the ‘Next’ button the program will request the operations to perform:

• Compile the complete project
• Compress the executable with UPX
• Make the installation file

The first option indicates if the complete project should be recompiled or only the modified modules. Automatically the debugger is deactivated on this process since there is no need to include any debugger information into the final executable.

The UPX compression permits to reduce the executable size without losing any speed. This option is highly recommend specially if the executable will be installed on a shared drive, because the load time of the executable will be higher and compressing it can reduce this time significantly. You can include any UPX parameter on this process. By default, includes the parameter to avoid the compression of the export section which is necessary when using ‘Advantage database server’. Consult the documentation of UPX (Xailerbin directory) for further information.

The third option permits you to run your own install creation program when the process is completed. A edit control is included in order to indicate the program to run and the parameters to use for it. Is not
necessary to include the complete path of the program, but only the name of the file to open since Xailer will search for the program associated with the file extension. On that edit control is possible to use some macros like the project directory, project name (without extension), executable directory and executable name (without extension).

We highly recommend to use the free InnoSetup install program along with ISTool for the creation of your own setup programs. The Xailer setup program is made with this tools.

Another important feature of this upgrade, highly demanded by a lot of users, is the ability to set the same property to more than one control at a time. On previous versions when you selected more than one control, the object inspector only showed the properties of the last control selected and if you updated any property, only the property of the last control selected was changed. From now on, when you select more than one control, the object inspector only shows the properties which are common to all the selected controls. In case all the control do not have the same value for a specific property, the value of that property will be shown blank. Of course, if you update the value all the selected controls will reflect the change. This same mechanism is also available for events.

One of the few limitations of SQLite, at least on its free version, is the absence of encryption support. This limitation becomes a really handicap on these days where the information protection is a must for any business application. There are commercial versions of SQLite that include this feature but they are very expensive or they required the acquisition of the software on every database installation. For those reasons we decide to create our own encryption system for the SQLite engine with no need to pay royalties of any kind for its use. The work is completely done, being extremely easy to encrypt or decrypt any database. The speed of the SQLite engine with encrypted tables has not been reduced at all. On our tests the difference is not appreciable. We have also change the SQLite database administrator in order to support encrypted databases.

A new important feature has been added by Pedro Gil to the TRichEdit control, the RTF to HTML conversion and also de DOCX format conversion (new Microsoft Office 2007 Word format).

Actually we are woking hard on this issues:

• Intellisense
• Multple projects support
• Data modules
• ‘Undo’ support on the form designer
• Improvements on controls cut and paste operations
• Report generator

The next upgrade of Xailer 2.0 will be published as a commercial product under the name Xailer 2.0 pre-release, so, the current Xailer 1.9 stops selling, but obviously we will continue giving support to that version. Of course, we encourage all of you to make the change 😉

The install file can be downloaded from the following link:

http://www.xailer.com/files/xailer20beta.exe

It requires also a new version of xHarbour that can be downloaded from the following link:

http://www.xailer.com/files/xharboursetup2.exe

We remind you that this version is only available to active registered users. For further information consult the article Xailer 2.0 news and enhancements on this same blog.

Best regards,

[Xailer team]