Includes traditional Synergy in Visual Studio, Joins in Select, and much more

Next week at the Synergy DevPartner Conference, we’ll announce the release of the latest update to our product suite—Synergy/DE 10.3.3. Conference attendees will get to learn about the new features firsthand. We look forward to showing you all the new capabilities!

New forums for questions/answers and ideas

New online forums will be launched at next week’s Synergy DevPartner Conference. The forums will be delivered through a new “zone” in the Synergy/DE Resource Center and will include:

• Answers, where you can post questions to the Synergy community and help provide answers to questions that others post. Answers replaces the synergy-l listserv and will make it much easier for you to tap in to the expertise of your peers.
• Ideas, where you can submit and comment on ideas for improving Synergy products and services. Ideas replaces the current process of submitting wishes to the Synergy/DE Developer Support team. It will enable you to weigh in on others’ ideas and will give Synergex broader input on the ideas submitted.

Those of you attending the conference next week will hear more about these new forums and may even win prizes for your early participation!

Cyber security expert Matt McKnight has spent the past 20 years designing, building, and deploying large scale national security and cyber security systems for the U.S. government. He regularly presents talks to organizations such as the FAA, DHS, and ODNI on topics ranging from emerging trends in software architecture to using machine learning to detect cyber security threats. Matt is an active software developer, and brings that perspective to this talk on what the implications of current threats are to developers. He will speak at the conference about current security risks and what you can do to mitigate them.

It’s not too late to register! The Synergy DevPartner Conference takes place May 23-27 in Washington, D.C. See the entire agenda here.

Developing traditional Synergy (and Synergy .NET) in Visual Studio
By Marty Lewis, Product Development Manager

Have you ever had one of those crazy product or feature ideas that starts gaining incredible traction very quickly? When you ask enough “what-ifs” of your product set, it’s bound to happen eventually. Late last October, the Synergy DBL Integration for Visual Studio (SDI) team came up with one of those ideas. The team presented it at the Synergy/DE Summit in November, and it has since taken on a life of its own. In this article, I would like to introduce this new SDI feature: support for traditional Synergy development in Visual Studio.

Visual Studio is a very big name in developer communities. Microsoft’s flagship development product is widely known for having some of the best developer-facing experiences available, with features such as IntelliSense, a very mature editor, formatting tools, sophisticated dependency-based build functionality, and extensibility.

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Transitioning to simpler, more manageable prototyping in Synergy/DE 10.3.3
By Penelope Perkins, Senior Technical Writer

We’ve made major changes to the Synergy Prototype utility (dblproto) and the compiler in 10.3.3 (scheduled for release next week). These changes correct problems that made it impossible to prototype some classes without CRC errors, as well as problems with missing and erroneous prototypes. They also improve performance, significantly reducing the overhead required to generate and use prototypes. But the first thing you’ll notice is how much simpler prototyping is now. Remember the hundreds of prototype files you used to generate? And the lengthy and complicated filenames? All gone—now when you run dblproto on a directory full of files, it will create a single .dbp file that contains prototypes for multiple files, and you can name that file anything you like (as long as it has a .dbp extension). The only bump on the road to attaining prototype simplification is that you’ll have to regenerate prototypes and maybe make some code changes. The changes to dblproto had a follow-on effect, so there are also changes to importing and SYNDEFNS and some other things. These changes may break your code and highlight coding errors. This article will try to help you make sense of the changes and ease the transition to 10.3.3.

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