See what attendees had to say about the recent conference.

The Synergy DevPartner Conference wrapped up in Chicago last month with record attendance. Attendees had great things to say…

“The presentations and tutorials alone are worth the trip, and networking with the other Synergy developers is icing on the cake. …”
      - Robert Harrison, HNR Systems LLC

“Attending the conference is like taking off the blindfold! The possibilities are endless, and being able to visit with others who've already implemented them saves us from the perils of developing new technologies on our own. … Synergex hits it out of the park once again!!!!”
      - Gayle Lewis, Agtrax

“As in years past, I received a wealth of information that will help me propose new and innovative products to my customers and management. Instead of saying ‘What's that?’ I can say ‘Yeah, we can do that.’”
      - Christian Borglum, Health Business Systems

Read all the testimonials at http://conference.synergex.com/testimonials.aspx.

Develop for Android and much more!

Synergy/DE 10.3 will deliver many exciting new features, including our initial Synergy .NET support for Mono, which gives you the ability to develop Synergy applications for Android devices. (Future releases will support iOS and OS X.

Synergy/DE 10.3 also includes numerous new features throughout the Synergy/DE toolset, including the following features available in this initial beta release. See the release notes and Online Manuals (available on the downloads page) for more details.

Synergy .NET support for Mono and Android devices:

• Develop applications for Android devices with Visual Studio and Xamarin tools.
• Use new cloud-based Synergy device licensing.

Synergy .NET compiler enhancements:

• Improved performance when using simple groups (includes reduced JIT startup time)
• Support for .BXOR., .BNAND., and .BNOT. with enumerations
• Support for default values for parameters for .NET types (allows optional parameters but with a default value)
• Support for conditional operators
• Support for collection initializers, which enable you to create collection objects and populate them (for use with the Systems.Collections.IEnumerable interface)
• Support for Unicode string literals using .unicode (e.g., symbols)
• Support for partial interfaces

Synergy DBL Integration for Visual Studio enhancements:

• Enhanced "show channels" debugger command now shows the channel number

Traditional Synergy DBL compiler enhancements:

• Support for READONLY STATIC class fields, STATIC classes, and simple properties
• Support for AS to indicate the type of members in a collection (useful for unboxing)
• Support for property initializers, which enable you to instantiate an instance of a class and set public properties without assignment statements
• Fewer restrictions for imports of namespaces for private class fields in imported classes

Workbench upgrade to SlickEdit 18:

• New UI features, including drag and dock file tabs
• Single module compile/librarian replace

Synergy .NET runtime enhancements:

• Support for xfNetLink Synergy (RXSUBR)
• Support for %DLL_CALL

Synergy DBMS (cross-platform) enhancements:

• Support for records larger than 64K in ISAM files on .NET and 64-bit traditional Synergy
• Ability to set maximum file size for an ISAM data file (useful for devices)
• Ability to update text in an ISAM file’s data header with ISCONFIG
• Optimized SELECT statement "in" operator (allows for efficient join functionality)

Why should you check out the 10.3 beta release?

• Learn how you can benefit from the latest Synergy features.
• Make sure your applications perform well with the latest Synergy version.
• Help your Synergy community ensure that 10.3 delivers optimal functionality and quality.

Our initial Synergy/DE 10.3 beta release (v10.2.3c) is available for Windows and Linux! Download it now.

Upcoming Synergy/DE patch will address this incompatibility.

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 Release Candidate (RC) on July 2. If you download and install this update (or its released version when available), Synergy projects will cause Visual Studio to crash. You should not download the RC or the released version until Synergex releases a patch to address this incompatibility. We will publish an announcement on Twitter and in Synergy-e-News when the patch is available.

Question
I am trying to migrate a traditional Synergy application that uses xfServer to a Synergy .NET application that is deployed on an IIS server. But I am having an issue with logicals that are used in the client application to identify the server. We set these environment variables in the synergy.ini file, as we normally do, but the application is not able to use them when it is deployed. Instead, I get a "file not found" error. Where should I define these environment variables?

Answer
In Synergy/DE v10.1.1c and higher, you will need to add a web.config file to your Visual Studio project, and this file will need the following items:

In the <configuration> block add

<configSections>
  <section name="SynergyEnvironment" type="System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler" />
</configSections>

You then need to create a <SynergyEnvironment> block to hold the variables you want to use:

<SynergyEnvironment>
  <add key="yourEnvironmentVariable" value="EnvironmentVariableDefintion" />
</SynergyEnvironment>

For example,

<SynergyEnvironment>
  <add key="DAT" value="SRV:@myServerName" />
</SynergyEnvironment>

When you deploy your application, put the web.config file in the root directory for the web application. Once you have done this and restarted IIS, your application should recognize the variables and work correctly.
If you are on Synergy/DE version 10.1.1b or lower, you will need to define the environment variables at the system level for them to be seen.