Why should I migrate from xHarbour to Harbour ?

[Antonio Linares]

I would like that we share here the reasons that we have found to migrate from xHarbour to Harbour:

1. CDX indexes get corrupted sometimes. As Michel Driessen reported here:

viewtopic.php?p=160601#p160601

Once he migrated to Harbour, those errors went away.

2. There is no xHarbour 64 bits version (unless I am wrong) so if your client ask you for a 64 bits version of your app, you will not be able to deliver it.

3. As far as I know, nobody has been able (yet) to build a xHarbour + FWH app from the Visual Studio IDE. I don't say that it is impossible. But I have not seen it yet. With Harbour you are free to build from the Visual Studio IDE or you can continue building from a batch/makefile as usual (even if you use Visual Studio). With almost no changes, you can build in 32 bits or 64 bits from VS (if you own FWH 64 bits).

3. I don't know the official percentages, but the Harbour users base has grown very much, thus Harbour has been getting a lot of feedback and it has been improving very fast and getting more and more robust. Both Harbour developers list and users list are _very_ active and this is a clear and healthy sign of its evolution.

4. Besides the above reasons, the more Harbour users the more Harbour will benefit and in consequence the more this community benefits too. To support two different products is a hell of tech support, specially because many xHarbour users bougth the commercial version (probably because they thought that using a commercial based product will be safer) but the fact is that the C compiler that xhb.com uses is not Borland neither Microsoft, but a modified version of PellesC. This has brought in the past many problems that needed special tech support (Tim Stone certainly can explain you about this, as he has gone through all the process, and finally he has migrated -or he is in the process of migrating- to Harbour). Tim, your comments here are welcome.

We invite you to share here your results from your migration from xHarbour to Harbour so other users get a clear idea of the advantages (and dissadvantages if any).

[Randal]

Antonio:

One of the main reasons I use xHarbour is rmdbfcdx. I did some testing a while back with dbfcdx driver in Harbour and it was much slower for filters, scopes, etc.

Can someone tell me if harbor dbfcdx is as fast or faster than rmdbfcdx?

Has anyone done any tests/comparisons lately?

Thanks,
Randal

[Antonio Linares]

Randal,

Miguel Angel Marchuet (BMDBFCDX RDD developer) emailed me this (some time ago):

el rdd BMDBFCDX lo porte a harbour, pero Viktor Szakàts lo modifico y lo estropeo.
de todos modos yo tengo la versión correcta funcionando que te adjunto.

donde ademas de implementar los "bitmap filters" lleva un pequeño api para manejo
de filtros a través de arrays

Translation:

I ported the rdd BMDBFCDX to Harbour, but Viktor Szakàts modified it and stopped working.
Anyhow I keep the right version that is working properly. Here I send it to you.

Besides the "bitmap filters" it includes a small api to manage filters through an array

Here you have it:
https://bitbucket.org/fivetech/harbour-xharbour-builds/downloads/rddbmcdx.rar

You may test it and in case there are any issues we can directly contact Miguel Angel

[fp]

I develop programs for over 5 years with xHarbour professionell - several hundred customers, some of them with very large databases (DBFNTX). Neither me nor my clients have ever had a problem with data or program. Why should I switch to harbour, where on the harbour Web site the current project Status is v3. 0.0, release date 2011-07-17? xHarbour prof. is from May 2014!

[Antonio Linares]

Frank,

The Harbour 3.2 that we use and has been built by us, it is available from here:

With Borland:
https://code.google.com/p/harbour-and-xharbour-builds/downloads/detail?name=harbour_bcc582_20131007.zip

With Microsoft:
https://code.google.com/p/harbour-and-xharbour-builds/downloads/detail?name=harbour_msvc2012_20131007_2.zip

Its good to know that you never experienced an issue. Unfortunately is not the same for some other users.

Thank you for your feedback,

[fp]

Thank you Antonio, and what would you prefer: BCC or MSVC ?

[Antonio Linares]

Frank,

I use both, it depends on my needs

Visual Studio integrated low level debugger is fantastic. A great tool when you have to debug C code.

Borland is quite friendly but Embarcadero is not (they don't provide an easy to download and use version, you don't have a low level debugger)

So the desition is up to you, but you will never know the right C compiler for you, unless you test both.

[Antonio Linares]

For a first migration I would recommend Borland, but once you feel comfortable with it, I recommend to give Visual Studio a try because it will increase your possibilities (you get an integrated resources editor -not included in the Express edition-, the low level debugger, code analysis, low level profiling, you can build your 32 and 64 bits apps with it, etc.)

If we are developing for Windows, doesn't have sense to use the free C compiler that Microsoft provides ? Because they build Windows and they know exactly what is needed, so their C compiler will be always updated when it is required

[driessen]

Antonio,

How can I get Microsoft Visual Studio?
What do I need exactly ? Which version?

Thanks.

[Antonio Linares]

Michel,

I use Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate (the most complete one) free from the university as Microsoft keeps alliances with many universities to promote their products, so fortunately I can use it for my research with no cost at all.

But Visual Studio 2013 Professional (cheaper) should be ok. As far as I know only the "Express" edition has several important limitations (surely to push people to buy a more complete version) as it does not include the built-in resources editor, and other features.

Anyhow, If you are working now with Borland and happy about the results, I would still wait for some time, as Tim Stone and me we are still doing research on Visual Studio 2013 to get the most of it. Once we finish our research we will publish here detailed instructions regarding its full use.

For now, I would recommend it to users that want to give it a try and start testing it, but not for production yet, until we learn to control every feature that it offers. This is only regarding the Visual Studio IDE, because in fact, we can easily build our apps with it without the IDE. if you don't need the IDE for now, then you can use it to build your apps in a similar way as you are doing with Borland (just a batch file and a makefile)

[Antonio Linares]

Anyhow, for those of you that really want to deliver 32 bits and 64 bits versions of your apps (this way you can offer different versions to your customers and make more bussiness easily, using the same source code for both) then Visual Studio is the way to go

[Rick Lipkin]

Antonio

Some years ago I loaded Visual Studio and noticed that the command line compiler ( CL.Exe ) was included and probably used by Visual Studio.

What I did was to copy all the relevant folders ( compiler, linker, libs, etc .. ) from Visual Studio and copied them to a test computer and using the libraries you suggest with Harbour(x)M.bat, I was able compile my programs to use the latest Microsoft MSVC compiler.

I Like the ability to have a built in Editor as well as resource editor .. I was just curious, with the newer versions of Visual Studio if you could just extract the relevant Bin folders ( etc ) and use your current compile options ( manually ) without having to learn the gui or is the newer Visual Studio too tightly integrated to only work with their gui ?

Thanks
Rick Lipkin

[elvira]

Antonio,

Does Visual Studio 2013 include the resource editor ?.

[cnavarro]

The Express version does not, like the 2012

[Antonio Linares]

Rick,

What you describes is the way we used to work with Visual Studio in the beginning (several years ago) but then we found that we were wrong.

We have to undertstand that the whole Visual Studio has to be installed (using Microsoft setup) in order to get it working properly, because Visual Studio uses several and very important settings (when Visual Studio vcvarsall.bat gets called. We do this automatically from FWH buildh32.bat and build64.bat). Without those settings Visual Studio does not work properly and you start getting compiling and linking problems.

If you install Visual Studio, and then use the files that we provide to build your apps, then everything is set the right way and it works really fine

So we must keep this in mind: Lets forget about extracting files from Visual Studio and using them separately. Visual Studio must be installed entirely and then everything will work really fine. And the use of the Visual Studio IDE is not a must. We can keep using it from a batch file/makefile, from a console window, as we do with Borland. But the good thing is that for those of you that want to use its IDE, then you can also do it, and benefit for all the features that the Visual Studio offers.

On every computer where Visual Studio is going to be used, you must download it from Microsoft and install it (the web installer works really fine, so it installs meanwhile it gets downloaded).

Really, Visual Studio has improved very much along the years and now its a really great tool. Feel free to use it from the command line or from the IDE. The way you prefer. And this is very good, because we have the freedom to use it the way we want

We have provided a makefile that works really fine (if you use several PRGs) and if your app is just a single PRG then you can use FWH\samples\buildh32.bat for 32 bits and build64.bat for 64 bits. I recommend all of you to give it a try. You will be surprised