Development Team Blog

Do you use Windows 7 or Windows Vista? Are you having problems compiling your application in the Studio? I'm not talking about compiler errors, I'm talking about the Studio reporting that it cannot delete the old application .exe file before compiling the new one! If you are seeing that problem then read on, I may have the solution (or at least a little good advice)...

[B]System Tune Up[/B]

Ages ago I had turned off the windows [I]Application Experience[/I] service ...

Attached Thumbnails

 

When it comes to performance working in the Studio as a developer, as opposed to running the application, there are generally two performance critical areas. The first one is the Studio Parser, which is the foundation for CodeSense, Visual Modeling, Go-To-Definition and more. The second performance critical area is when compiling. Unnecessarily long and slow compile times can make for a very frustrating experience working with the Visual DataFlex Studio.

Sometimes you may not even ...

Attached Thumbnails

           

In the [URL="http://support.dataaccess.com/forums/blog.php?b=59"]previous article[/URL] I explained how to access the workspace paths in a Create New wizard. The information is retrieved via the Studio Workspace file (.sws) that is passed to the wizard via a temporary config file. Accessing the wizard's temporary config file is explained in [URL="http://support.dataaccess.com/forums/blog.php?b=56"]part one[/URL] of this series.

In this article I will talk about the ...

In the [URL="http://support.dataaccess.com/forums/blog.php?b=56"]previous article[/URL] I introduced the config file that the Studio generates each time it launches a Create New wizard. The name and path of this config file is passed to the launched application and the file contains information about your project that is useful to a Create New wizard application.

In this article I will talk in more detail about one particular section of data in the config file: the [Workspace] ...

Have you ever wanted to write your own wizard and add it to the Studio's Create New dialog?

Adding a wizard application to the Create New dialog is managed by the "Configure Create New" option in the "Tools" menu. That is the easy part, But how can your wizard access the important information about your workspace that it needs in order to do anything useful? Come to think of it, how do the "standard wizards" get the Studio to open the files that they just ...

In Visual DataFlex 14.1 we added data dictionary modeling to the Studio. This task used to be performed by the Database Builder tool.

Database Builder used a quite primitive approach to source code modeling. It relied on special marker comments and a set of hard-coded symbols to understand how to model a data dictionary class.

The Studio's modeler is more powerful and flexible. It properly analyzes the source code of the data dictionary file and all of the files used ...

The Visual DataFlex Studio parser is actually two separate parsers, one is parsing source code and the other is parsing the tree structure output by the first one. The first one is internally referred to as the CDS(Code Data Structure) Parser, and the second one is referred to as the Metadata Parser. But often they are referred to collectively as the Studio Parser, as the technical distinctions are often irrelevant unless you're discussing Studio internals. The CDS and Metadata parsers are also ...

Attached Thumbnails

       

With Visual DataFlex 2008 and above, you no longer need to use meta-tags to declare every change to a property's initial value in a class declaration. Take a look at the following example:
[code]
Class cCloseButton is a Button
Procedure Construct_Object
Set Label to 'Close'
End_Procedure
End_Class[/code]Prior to version 14.1 if you created this cCloseButton class and add it to a view in the Studio's Visual Designer the label doesn’t appear. To ...

A Visual DataFlex program doesn't have to consist of windows, views and dialogs, you can write command line style programs in VDF too. And the best part is that the VDF Studio (12.x and later) fully supports programs that have no graphical user interface as first class citizens. All the wonderful features, such as CodeSense, the CodeExplorer, the Properties panel, all treat any source code the same, afterall, it's all source code and [I]source code rules[/I]. This may seem obvious unless you've ...

During the development of Visual DataFlex 12.0 we modified the compiler to track any changes to source code that belong to a precompiled package. For example, let's say you have a precompiled package (MyPrecompile.pkg) and one of the files used by MyPrecompile.pkg was edited since it was last precompiled. Now, when you go to compile a project that uses this precompile, the Compiler would detect the change and raise an error that the precompile is out of date.

This was a good change ...

[I]Note: This information applies to Visual DataFlex 2008 and higher[/I]

During development of 12.0 and 12.1 we received feedback with several suggestions for improving CodeSense. Many of those suggestions, along with some other ideas we had during development, were out of scope for 12.0, so we logged them in our bugtracker database as either bugs/suggestions. During development of 12.1 we fixed a lot of the pure bugs and performance issues, but we didn't have time to address some ...