brian

Hello All,

The Visual Objects Platinum Subscription Program has been a big success.
Since we are still looking for a few more members, we thought a status
update of the Visual Objects Platinum Subscription would be helpful.

We invite you to join us at VOPS by subscribing at your earliest
convenience. By doing so, you have full access to all of our Visual Objects
32 builds and all of the Vulcan .net builds so you can closely monitor our
progress. More information on VOPS is available at
http://www.grafxsoft.com/vosubscribe.htm

During the first 4 months of the VOPS, the VO Development Team delivered
four new builds of Visual Objects 32bit on average of once per month. These
builds included fixes only available to members of VOPS.

We are committed to continue to fix bugs, maintain the VO 32 bit source, and
are working on upgrades to the VO32bit product. (These include, but are not
limited to New Source Code Editor, New Error Browser, and many
fixes to the OLE classes.)

Vulcan.Net

Our Dot Net Project, now called Vulcan.net is progressing very nicely as
well. Since the new year, four VOPS builds of Vulcan.net have been delivered
to VOPS members.

only able to produce a" hello world .net exe". We demo Vulcan.net at the
London DevFest in February, we where able to show fully working .net
programs and the ability to step through the Vulcan.net programs using the
MS VS Debugger. In the last 2 months, very substantial progress has been
made.

A complete IDE has been written in Vulcan.Net. The products author, Chris
Pyrgas tells us Vulcan IDE is aprox. 13,000 lines of code. VulcanIDE is
complete with source code editor and screen designer. (VulcanIDE product is
still in beta, however it has been made available to all VOPS members free
of charge while in beta. Thanks Chris! )

Many other examples have been written, from simple WinForms, to working with
XML. New samples are being added on a regular basis.

Vulcan.net's major components are simultaneously under development. They
are.

Vulcan Compiler
VulcanDB (Data Driver)
Vulcan Runtime
AEF2PRG Utility.

When these components are finished you will be able to take, for example the
standard MDI application that VO produces and compile it in Vulcan.net with
no code changes. (yielding a .net exe)

The stated goal is to be able to take your Visual Object code and be able to
compile it in Vulcan .net. We expect that we will achieve a very high rate
of success in this area via the use of an export utility written in Visual
Objects that will export your code into .prgs ready to be compiled in
Vulcan.net

We urge you to join VOPS. Are numbers are growing each week. If you want a
look at the future of Visual Objects and Vulcan today, all you need to do is
to register your copy of Visual Objects 2.7 at http://www.cavo.com/register
then visit http://www.grafxsoft.com/vosubscribe.htm to subscribe. You'll
have access with in just a few hours of ordering.


All the best,

For the Visual Objects 32 bit & Vulcan.net Development teams,

Brian
GrafX Software
http://www.grafxsoft.com

robert van der hulst

Hi Willie,


Thanks for the nice words.
It is a pleasure to work with you.
As Brian already mentioned: we have great plans for the next couple of
months. There is much more to come !

--
Robert van der Hulst
VO Development Team

john parker

Hi Willie and All,
Thank you all, it is nice to know that our efforts are appreciated and,
judging by the feedback that we have been getting, it is good to see that we
are going in the right direction with both VO32 and Vulcan.Net.

It is interesting for me to remember that I joined CA because of VO and I
left CA because I still believed in VO.
I can also say in all honesty that CA NEVER had me working so hard :-)
Brian - Please do not think I am complaining. It is an indication of how
much has been achieved in so short a time and I am sure that the members of
VOPS will agree.

Talk to you all soon,
John

mark ayliffe

We got involved with VOPS because VO is fundamental to our product and
clearly after some years of neglect our compiler was going to need
support. We've been using VO now for around 10 years and Clipper before
that.

The responsiveness of the development teams at GraFX is unparalleled as
others have commented. For once we may well have a recent build of VO32
which is stable enough for us to release to our users with confidence.
In the past we've had so often to write code to work around problems in
the VO compiler or runtime and for each of our builds you could flip a
coin over whether the compiler had got it right or not.

In our market the pressures to move to .NET are gentle as yet so we're
not likely to be among the first to use Vulcan.net for real. However the
first indications of exposing our codebase to it have been positive.
We'll continue to keep working with it and feeding back to the
developers how it works or doesn't in the "real world" along with the
others doing the same thing.

GraFX have picked up the baton of VO development and are demonstrating
to their predecessors (should they care to look!) how it should be done.
I don't think we've ever had such close cooperation with the developers
of VO and it's certainly making a difference to us after a few short
months. It is worth our investment both of the subscription fees and the
time to evaluate these beta versions already.

If VO is important to your business for the foreseeable future then join
VOPS. At the very least you get possibly the most stable VO compiler to
date, earlier than you would otherwise. At best you can get any specific
problems you have with the compiler/IDE/run time fixed very quickly.
GraFX are doing a good job and they are worthy of your support. Run,
don't walk!

Mark
--
Mark Ayliffe MA CEng MBCS, Senior Consultant Jobstream Group PLC
http://www.jobstream.com +44 (0)1223 433900