So, starting with version 11 Alpha Five now offers support for the .NET v4 framework. Great.
But who of you has until now ever used this feature and besides some fiddling around with it actually got some astonishing result doing so that could enlighten others?
Yes, I have seen the video of the Swedish application for live stock.
Looking into this matter right now, what strikes me is:
1) The documentation on .NET support is extremely thin. It all starts here on the AlphaPedia and besides a few pages of text it quickly points to Microsoft as if all hail will come from that.
2) There is no step-by-step instruction or example as Alpha has always used to do. There are examples, but they all throw the Alpha Five developer straight into the deep and are no "let's take you by the hand and let's do it together" type of examples where an Alpha Five developer would be able to start getting into use of this technology.
3) You can't use C# or any other CLI language. Since Alpha's Xbasic is not a common intermediate language it can not be executed using an implementation of CLI like the CLR as part of the .NET framework. Point being that your knowledge of approaching the .NET framework using let's say C# is pretty useless. Well, not completely useless of course, but you can't approach .NET objects writing classes and utilizing methods etc in straight C# or C++ which is a pity. This all being not the case, you can't directly use xbasic, and you can't use any CLI in Alpha Five, you are stuck with using xbasic wrappers as I understand it. The use of those however is not explained to a satisfactory level as far as I am concerned (and I have confirmation already of some very knowledgeable developers that think likewise).
4) You can't use Microsoft's visual studio to create code that you would copy to Alpha Five. See 3).
So, what we are left with is a feature that is not quite open to everybody here on this forum since it is very hard to explore the route to go by yourself without Alpha Five grabbing you at the arm, and without plowing through millions of pages of Microsoft documentation that never ever anywhere state "How to use with Alpha Five" if you catch my drift. If you do some research on this very forum by entering .NET as a search word you see that there are only minor entries that actually get to the point. Some very well known and great developers on this forum even did not know the difference between ASP.NET and .NET and seem a bit helpless in the water. There are no serious attempts to be found (besides the one video I already mentioned which was if I may say only a connect to webservices) on this forum to utilize the .NET framework to tap into one of its feature-rich objects and get it to use in an Alpha application.
Also, when you look at Wikipedia, most of its very limited entries are dated back to somewhere in may 2011 which shows that in the last 2 years nothing new has been added of any relevance to the AlphaPedia help on using .NET with Alpha Five.
As I see it, this is really a pity. The connection to the .NET framework is way more important then it looks like it is given credit for, and the current effort to get the average Alpha Five developer on the road with this functionality is lacking spirit and content. I can't understand why. Why not take a simple and straight forward example in the line of "come on, we will help you, pay close attention we will start by step 1", a step-by-step tutorial showing you what you EXACTLY need to do, and WHY you need to do it in order to get good use of the .NET framework ? Why has this not been given more attention since 2011?
As a result, it is still in the "feature storage room" with for instance "use of web components on the desktop" which is not used by many developers as well due to several issues that are not explained or things that are not possible: since when has Alpha changed its policy from: "we will make it easy for you" in to "please help yourself, here is a link to Microsoft" ? This does not help with the average Alpha Five user.
So this post is for two reasons:
1) To get this to attention of Alpha Five, with the request to add one of those fine "step-by-step" tutorials with some videos on how to achieve things, for instance on the matter how to make use of the Calendar object of the .NET framework in your Alpha Five application (or anything else for that matter).
2) To get a discussion going on this on the forum, are there any developers that have something to share, have written good code, are willing to be a guide to others, maybe place some snippets here on how they have done things, that kind of stuff.
The .NET framework is very rich, it really is a pity that (as it seems to me) this is left to hang somewhere in an exotic corner of the Alpha Five platform.
But who of you has until now ever used this feature and besides some fiddling around with it actually got some astonishing result doing so that could enlighten others?
Yes, I have seen the video of the Swedish application for live stock.
Looking into this matter right now, what strikes me is:
1) The documentation on .NET support is extremely thin. It all starts here on the AlphaPedia and besides a few pages of text it quickly points to Microsoft as if all hail will come from that.
2) There is no step-by-step instruction or example as Alpha has always used to do. There are examples, but they all throw the Alpha Five developer straight into the deep and are no "let's take you by the hand and let's do it together" type of examples where an Alpha Five developer would be able to start getting into use of this technology.
3) You can't use C# or any other CLI language. Since Alpha's Xbasic is not a common intermediate language it can not be executed using an implementation of CLI like the CLR as part of the .NET framework. Point being that your knowledge of approaching the .NET framework using let's say C# is pretty useless. Well, not completely useless of course, but you can't approach .NET objects writing classes and utilizing methods etc in straight C# or C++ which is a pity. This all being not the case, you can't directly use xbasic, and you can't use any CLI in Alpha Five, you are stuck with using xbasic wrappers as I understand it. The use of those however is not explained to a satisfactory level as far as I am concerned (and I have confirmation already of some very knowledgeable developers that think likewise).
4) You can't use Microsoft's visual studio to create code that you would copy to Alpha Five. See 3).
So, what we are left with is a feature that is not quite open to everybody here on this forum since it is very hard to explore the route to go by yourself without Alpha Five grabbing you at the arm, and without plowing through millions of pages of Microsoft documentation that never ever anywhere state "How to use with Alpha Five" if you catch my drift. If you do some research on this very forum by entering .NET as a search word you see that there are only minor entries that actually get to the point. Some very well known and great developers on this forum even did not know the difference between ASP.NET and .NET and seem a bit helpless in the water. There are no serious attempts to be found (besides the one video I already mentioned which was if I may say only a connect to webservices) on this forum to utilize the .NET framework to tap into one of its feature-rich objects and get it to use in an Alpha application.
Also, when you look at Wikipedia, most of its very limited entries are dated back to somewhere in may 2011 which shows that in the last 2 years nothing new has been added of any relevance to the AlphaPedia help on using .NET with Alpha Five.
As I see it, this is really a pity. The connection to the .NET framework is way more important then it looks like it is given credit for, and the current effort to get the average Alpha Five developer on the road with this functionality is lacking spirit and content. I can't understand why. Why not take a simple and straight forward example in the line of "come on, we will help you, pay close attention we will start by step 1", a step-by-step tutorial showing you what you EXACTLY need to do, and WHY you need to do it in order to get good use of the .NET framework ? Why has this not been given more attention since 2011?
As a result, it is still in the "feature storage room" with for instance "use of web components on the desktop" which is not used by many developers as well due to several issues that are not explained or things that are not possible: since when has Alpha changed its policy from: "we will make it easy for you" in to "please help yourself, here is a link to Microsoft" ? This does not help with the average Alpha Five user.
So this post is for two reasons:
1) To get this to attention of Alpha Five, with the request to add one of those fine "step-by-step" tutorials with some videos on how to achieve things, for instance on the matter how to make use of the Calendar object of the .NET framework in your Alpha Five application (or anything else for that matter).
2) To get a discussion going on this on the forum, are there any developers that have something to share, have written good code, are willing to be a guide to others, maybe place some snippets here on how they have done things, that kind of stuff.
The .NET framework is very rich, it really is a pity that (as it seems to me) this is left to hang somewhere in an exotic corner of the Alpha Five platform.
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