It’s that time of year again when PC Soft releases their new versions of developer products with exciting new features. Here’s some of the new stuff that I am especially excited about.
Layout Control
A better UI experience now as hidden controls currently just create gaps, but with the layout control all other controls move to fill the space.
End User Image Editor
You can now give the user capabilities to edit their own images, which is great when they wish to annotate an image or making size aadjustments.
PDF Viewer within app
No need to open a seperate PDF reader as now you can view direct within your app. This is great for me as not only can our users view Word documents within the app, they can now do the same for PDF which means no switching between apps.
Excel XLSX loading
We can even go one step further now and load Excel worksheets into the spreadsheet control as well as there being lots more features in the control.
Word Processor Control HTML Text Edit Mode
Now you can use the Wordprocessor control for user email creation without the need for them to switch to Outlook etc. This is a great feature which will enhance our products even further.
Quickly Create Tasks from Requirements
There a cool new interface that will allow you, for a selected requirement, create tasks and include dependencies. I’m using project monitoring more and more lately as a productivty tool to manage requirements and implement the features.
Naming Planes
I make great use of planes in windows so that I can quickly switch views for a particular piece of functionality. Previously these planes were named 1 to X but now you can edit the name and make them more descriptive, which helps you and other developers understand the purpose of a particular plane.
SQL in Code
There a new declaration variable SQL Query you can use in code that will assist you in writing SQL directly in code, with syntax hightlighting, code completion and detecting errors. This is a big one for me as I like to have control over my SQL when there are complex queries. Previously I would use SQL Manager to build and test the query, then copy and paste the SQL code into a WLanguage string variable. I’m not sure if it goes so far as to be able to test the SQL in this release but if not then that would be a great future release feature.
RandomCrypto
This is a very handy little function that will generate a random number where the sequence cannot be reproduced.
Setting a Procedure/Classes as deprecated
In WLanguage they call it Zombie Procedures. These are procedures/Classes that roam the code but will be removed in future versions as there are new procedure that have been introduced to perform a piece of functionality better.
Interface
We can now develop systems with a more modern approach, building an interface that a class can then implement. Makes the code a lot cleaner and is a welcome addition.