Hi everyone,
I'm just trying to get some opinions of Synergy for .Net. Has anybody used it to develop applications? Any opinions?
Thanks in advance,
J
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Hi everyone,
I'm just trying to get some opinions of Synergy for .Net. Has anybody used it to develop applications? Any opinions?
Thanks in advance,
J
I have been a developer using Synergy/DE, Synergy .NET and a number of other languages, on various platforms, for years. If you've coded in C# or VB .NET, then you know how verbose it can sometimes be. People get used to it. Synergy .NET is like a breath of fresh air. The folks at Synergex have pulled off a remarkable feat. They've taken a language that was known for it's ability to churn out high-quality enterprise-class code, and managed to make it a .NET language that can hold it's own up against C# and VB. In fact, I still prefer coding in Synergy .NET over C# especially - it's just easier, more intuitive, and the numerous libraries that you still have access to in Synergy .NET just make your code more readable. I usually grumble a lot when coding C# - I hit that rebuild button and SOMETHING is always a little off. When I'm coding in Synergy .NET, I love it when that reubuild comes back clean, time and time again. The other big plus is access to the ISAM structures as well. Everyone grumbles that everything should be in SQL - let's face it, some code is just overly complex when SQL is added to the equation. While Synergy .NET handles SQL beautifully, the ability to do SQL-like queries against a sophisticated multi-key highly shared ISAM can be a real god send. Give Synergy .NET a shot. You'll keep coming back to it.
Wondering what type of applications are you using/have you used it for? Trying to understand the ups and downs of Synergy over C#?
Again I ask, what type of applications have you used it for? And I understand that your opinion of Sysnergy is as it is, but can you provide something a little bit more factual as to why it is a good use case?Quote:
Originally Posted by ForTheLoveOfCode
Using Synergy I've written critical line-of-business applications for many business sectors including manufacturing, retail, the travel industry and more. Many of the older applications run on operating systems such as OpenVMS, UNIX and Windows. With the availability of Synergy.NET I’m now able to develop modern OO structured Windows (WinForm and WPF) Web and WinRT systems. Because Synergy continues to support its procedural syntax the code I wrote 15 years ago is usable within Synergy.NET without change – a vital capability when enhancing order processing systems written many years ago! Recently I've added a multi-threaded ultra-responsive click-one deployed dashboard application written entirely in Synergy.NET/Visual Studio and utilizing code I wrote many years ago to process and analyse years of inventory data using grids, charts and other DevExpress UI controls to present the statistical information the customer required. If you are looking for a modern development language and “live” in Visual Studio, Synergy has a proven past and a guaranteed future so Synergy.NET should certainly be in your developer toolbox.
Great info thank you. If you had to develop just a web-based or windows-based system, and were going to start from scratch, would you still invest in the synergy infrastructure on top of VS to do windows development, or would you go with just the simplicity of VS knowing what you now know about the evolution of both products?Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard@RCP
Like Richard, I have been using Synergy for over 30 years working on line of business applications for Engineering & Residential Building Industries in Australia. We in the process of writing a new Dashboarding/BI application using Synergy.Net (starting from scratch) which accesses data from our main flagship application. We could have done this development in C# or VB.NET (we are conversant in all of these languages), however this project has been used to prove the point that the Synergy.Net development toolset is a first class player in the Visual Studio environment. The results so far have been great and we have shipped our first beta version and working on new features for additional clients.
As far as your situation, the answer to your question of whether to adopt the Synergy development environment would be "it depends" (to quote the famous software architect Juval Lowy from Idesign Inc). It depends on your project requirements, your licensing model, your experience, your existing toolkits etc etc. So to provide more help you would need to provide a bit of a summary of the project you are looking to develop. The original design brief for the Synergy language was for writing "Commercial Software" (originally DIBOL developed in the 70's as an alternative to COBOL & Fortran). The Synergy Development Environment of 2013 is a far cry from the original language which had to run in constraints such as 64K data & procedure segments etc. Hope this helps
I would agree with the last post, it depends on your requirements – like everything in life. There is one guarantee that Synergy has always maintained – code you write today will work tomorrow. I’ve been bitten too many time in the past with other languages. Remember VB6 – unfortunately Microsoft seem to forget that we all wrote loads of code using it, and when VB.NET came along the patch forwards was not exactly billiard table smooth. And more recently the decision to drop Silverlight has been a real problem for me. Synergy has always been able to take advantage of new capabilities and still builds and supports code from years gone by.
OK great info so far. But I have been working with Synergy in VS 2012 and 2013 for a month now. Whenever I try to code the Synergy project and a c# wpf project in the same solution, I lose the ability to use intellisense, I get errors indicating that the SynergyCode is invalid, yet my code runs and accesses it supposedly fine. I compile the app and I end up with a visual Studio solution with 99 errors, everyone of the indicating that the code that Synergy is using isn't valid, yet it all runs.Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard@RCP
I've been looking for anything on Synergy's site that will help point me in the right direction. I've had gotomeetings with Synergy support, and they also don't understand what is going on. They can't seem to understand why 99 errors are ocurring yet everything runs. They see windows framework elements in the c# be flagged as invalid in VS as well.
You guys seem to know how to make c# and Synergy play nicely in Visual Studio. Can you share the knowledge? I would think it would be quite the shot in the arm for Synergex if this would work.
Looks like the replies were written by Synergy employees.
One visit, one reply about how good the product is, and then never return to really answer the question :down:
Can you give example(s) of the error messages you get?
Disclosure - I know nothing of Synergy, I just like trying to fix stuff
That's harsh - this is after all a VB forum, not a Synergy .NET forum. I'm happy to provide feedback but there is nothing to add. I use Synergy .NET in VS2013/Win 8.1 every day and do so very successfully. It appears EDIGUY is having problems, but without error messages there is little I can do to help or advise. If we have the errors/example code then I will certainly assist.
To be fair, the folks at Synergy have been very helpful in trying to get the project moving forward.Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard@RCP
However, the positive answers regarding Synergy that I see come from people that have used Synergy for years. I have used Visual Studio for years. So that's difficult for me to measure the responses as far as which is better/worse.
Bottom line is this: I have no choice to use the Synergy ISAM DB for this project. I am writing the UI in WPF. My biggest problem is getting the bindings to work properly. If this were a RDMBS DB, I could do this pretty simply. Unfortunately, it's not RDBMS, and therein lies the issues I am having.
Perhaps I can figure out how to use xfODBC for this, but at this point I'm not sure how that would work within the development environment.
I will say this. With VS and .Net I can find the answer to almost any question I have in hundreds of sources easily. Synergy seems to only have their site as a decent source, and that's pretty lean when it comes to VS and .Net. So I have to create support tickets left and right and drive them crazy. Synergy also does not play nice with some helper tools, such as Telerik's JustCode, BTW.
I'm going to attempt to try using the Entity Framework to access some of this data but I have no idea what will happen.
Search the CodePlex site for Symphony Framework and CodeGen. The Symphony Framework allows you to create objects that expose properties based on your Synergy data. Read the data from your Synergy DBMS file using the select class or direct IO operations and create Symphony Data Objects. You XAML simply binds to the properties using the converters available in the framework (to convert from your synergy types to .NET types). Check out www.symphonyframework.net for some simple examples of what you can do.