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Last June in Miami (Synergy 2005) Data Access announced the inception of "Project Horizon
". This was to be a complete redesign and redeveloment of the Visual DataFlex Studio from the ground up. At the time we had some reservations, but we kept them to ourselves, however now that we can see something approaching the finished product we have completely dismissed them.
The new Studio (or IDE) provides a cutting-edge development environment for Visual DataFlex, replete with productivity and accuracy-improving technologies that are the equal of any in the market.
The new "CodeSense" facility has been made both pervasive and context sensitive. This means that the Studio can (it is configurable to your preferences) prompt you as you type, providing you with lists of valid options to type next at every point. You can have it complete the line of code for you, or suggest the list of possible choices where there is more than one.
For instance (thanks to John van Houten of DAW for the examples), if you type:
Use[space]
it will prompt you with a list of all the files in your workspace's MakePath, while if you type:
Procedure Set Value[space]
it will complete the action for you as:
Procedure Set Value Integer iItem String sValue
End_Procedure
because it knows what the argument list for Procedure Set Value has to be.
All of this, once you get used to using it, not only improves the speed and productivity of the
developer, but also helps eliminate errors from the code by perpetually offering only valid choices
of what to type next. Indeed if you invoke it and are offered no suggestions, then the most
obvious conclusion is that what you have just typed is itself invalid.
Code Completion can also be invoked before completing a word, to see the list of possible matching
alternatives. It is aware of the classes you are working with and so will only suggest things that are appropriate to that class, again helping to avoid errors.
There are many other important features in Project Horizon and we do not have space to deal with them all here. Go to the the Visual DataFlex newsgroup to read more, or download a copy and try them out.
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