TOPIC:

This is something I was wondering. Currently our VO programs work fine. Certainly not without issues but nor does an X# program (or C# program or most of the other programs we use including Office or Windows). That makes it tempting to continue with VO as programming in the VO IDE is much more productive and comfortable than doing the same in VS, regardless the version.

However, we do see issues with real old programs appearing with technology changes. E.g. my very old Agent newsreader can not be scaled on a 4K monitor. Fortunately I can read very small fonts (or move it to my 2nd 2K monitor). Also it's about the only program which does not react on my mouse' setting to issue a double click by pressing the mouse wheel.

Now these are minor issues, but what I was wondering: what would happen if some change in e.g. Windows 10 would influence the normal working of a VO created program? We have seen some issues in the past years usually followed by a workaround. Should that happen and not fixable with a workaround, would you be able to modify a component of VO?

Dick

Do you mean by "you", yourself?

If so, you can change certain code if you have the VO SDK source code, however, certain VO runtime DLLs source code is not part of the SDK and it would be hard to modify if impossible unless you're a dissembler wiz or a hacker!
Having said that, X# is open source and comes with full source and you may be to learn or borrow certain code that relates to VO; this may or not work for your exact situation.

My 2 cents!

ic2 wrote: Now these are minor issues, but what I was wondering: what would happen if some change in e.g. Windows 10 would influence the normal working of a VO created program? We have seen some issues in the past years usually followed by a workaround. Should that happen and not fixable with a workaround, would you be able to modify a component of VO?
Dick

Hello Jamal,

Jamal wrote: Do you mean by "you", yourself?

No, I mean the development team, I wasn't to clear about that.
I am not sure if they are even legally allowed to fix issues like that and if so, if they are willing to; after all X# is the main project.

I do suspect however that there are lots of active projects around in VO where, for various reasons, an X# conversion is far away. Meaning that X# versus VO is like Windows 10 versus Windows 7 (where W10 finally starts to gain more users and W7 less since February this year, 3,5 years after the first fully working W10 - as far as you can ever call a Microsoft product "fully working").

Dick

Hi Dick,
since we all have the sources to the VO class libraries, issues there can be fixed, and most likely changes in Windows will provocate errors there.
But if a change would affect the VO runtime: there is people around that has access to the latest sources, but I have my doubts they will change something and release an update because this is a lega issue.
But IMHO the first thing that will cease to work will the VO IDE.
Therefore I plan to move all my important applications to X# sooner or later - this is the only guarantee for the future. And when Robert releases the new GUI classes based on Windows Forms, I will try to move my applications there to be sure.
The worst case anyway would be if the RDDs stopped working.... we don't have the sources ourself, and they have a much more unclear license status than the VO runtime.
Wolfgang

Hi Dick

Aside from any legal issues there are numerous technical points to consider.

I can't see why modifications to Windows 10 would give rise to more problems. Backward compatibility is likely to be maintained.

But if something else caused problems as you suggest, scaling for example, then probably modifying a component of VO would not do the trick. Legacy stuff was not designed for current hardware, scaling fonts and so on require mods to the program eg points in doubles, vector graphics, aliasing and so forth would need to be addressed.

Is it worth the effort?

Terry