As an (almost former) VOPS member I was surprised to see a message in the public newsgroup about this. As VOPS funds the development of Vulcan I would have expected to be one of the first to know and the first to have it. “Vulcan 1.0 is now shipping”, yeh sure and Brian does that from Rome?
The unexpected release was surprising as the product is far from ready (if ever).
As discussed on several occasions, Vulcan.NET is not only a .NET compiler, it is also the VO compatible class libraries, the ability of editing VO forms, VS integration etc.
For the .NET language others have been very convincing that a .NET language would not be useful without the support of language elements as generics and interfaces. Well I am sorry if I disappoint anyone, but the current release of Vulcan does not fully support these. For example, you are not able to inherit from an Interface.
“Vulcan is fully integrated with Visual Studio” is one of Grafx marketing slogans. Now Visual Studio is a very powerful tool with a lot of features and options and I doubt I have seen even half of them. So I can understand if not all features are implemented in the first release, but Vulcan 1.0 does not even support a basic feature like Intellisense.
Now perhaps if you have been developing in .NET for the past 5 years you do not need Intellisense, but to me it is something I cannot do without and do not want to do without.
The powerful and very handy refactoring-options of VS are not available also. And if there is one thing I would like to do when I move any code from VO to Vulcan it is Refactoring! Databinding is another thing that is not supported, so the ‘Add new datasource wizard’ is not available.
I remember Ed Richard talking about the databinding in VS2005 as getting a warm bath. The Vulcan VS integration is more like a very cold shower!!
And I am not even talking about CF support for Vulcan VS.
Vulcan 1.0 does come with a transporter and yes you can move VO code to a Vulcan VS project. Very nice to see Vulcan versions of the VO samples and impressive how you can use VOforms and Winforms at the same time.
But once you have done it, you are not able to edit your VO forms, other than to do it in VO and transport it again. Now that is not what I consider very useful.Again, we have discussed this before and at that time I was blamed to be speculating. Now I can say “you see I was right all the time”, but that does not satisfy me very much. In fact I am disappointed I was right, as I would have loved to see a great product to be launched.
3PP not available
Before I am able to move any of my applications, I need a Vulcan version of 3th party products as Report Pro, bBrowser and VO2ADO. They are not available (yet? ) .
Resume.
With this release the language lacks important .NET language elements, VS integration is so basic it is not useful, VO form/Menu /dbServer editors and the mostly used 3PP are not available.
Despite some cataract I think I can see sharp now….