DAFUG - Toni Feltman and eTecnologia .NET Tools

We got a special sneak preview of some of the stuff Toni's going to show at Southwest Fox.

Toni showed us two products from eTecnologia.

First we saw the .NET Compiler for VFP which allows us to create a .NET Assembly from a PRG. This is compiled to pure IL code. Currently, the compiler supports about 1/2 of the VFP commands, but "they" are actively working on more.

The authors consider the current product to be in the "alpha" stage and there should be a new release soon.

Toni showed us a simple demo PRG which scanned through records and printed a field to the desktop. She ran the PRG in Fox and printed 3 names to the screen then compiled the PRG and ran the .NET assembly from a command line and it printed the same 3 names! Cool!

I won't give away too much of Toni's presentation - you'll have to wait until Southwest Fox to get all the details, but suffice it to say that eTecnologia is making great progress on their compiler. We saw many things that are already supported and some language "enhancements" that have been added.

One of the DAFUGers commented that the author took this opportunity to change the language a bit according to his own preferences.

We then spent some time discussing what things might make for good demonstrations for Southwest Fox and the real world potential for this product.

Toni then went on to show the .NET extender which allows us to include .NET controls on VFP forms. She demoed both UI controls and non-UI controls. Although I don't fully have my head around how this actually comes together, I think there is a great deal of potential here.