We have a long range plan for the evolution of Gupta/Centura (and now Unify) systems to Microsoft .NET and to new technologies. And apparently Microsoft is catching up with us :)
C# 4.0 adds a long list of features that would make many developers salivate to use them right away. What has attracted my interest the most is the new Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) and how it perfectly fits our Gupta migration technology.
In short, the new DLR features in C# 4.0 introduce dynamic objects and dynamic language integration directly into the core .NET system. This allows a developer to implement methods and properties without declaring them. It's a sort of "compilation on the fly" feature. As usual, a code snippet is worth a thousand words:
dynamic test = new MyTest();
test.Text = "No way I can do this in SAL!";
test.HelloWorld();
test = test + test;
...
class MyTest : DynamicObject
{
public override bool TryInvokeMember(...) {}
public override bool TryBinaryOperation(...) {}
}
See that? You can reference non-existing members in a dynamic object and your dynamic methods will be called at runtime and allow you to do just about anything, including creating your own specialized language.
Actually, talking about specialized language, Microsoft also added complete support for dynamic script compilers and interpreters.
We already have that in the PPJ Framework in order to support dynamic SQL binding and we are already using a very fast dynamic IL generation compiler to achieve tremendous speed when binding SQL parameters and intos. However, in future versions of the PPJ we will take full advantage of the new DLR to make our SQL binding layer much smaller and even faster.
C# 4.0 is perfectly timed for us and for our plans. We have not unveiled the full power of the new PPJ Services solution (our ground breaking technology to move Gupta/Centura applications to the Cloud) and I will not disclose it here. But I can say that the new dynamic objects feature (see code snippet above) allows us to complete a large piece of the PPJ Services solution in a much shorter period of time and in a perfectly integrated way.