Planning Objectives

When planning the Synergy/DE Roadmap, our objectives are to

• Provide access to emerging technologies and platforms
• Enhance developer productivity and the Synergy developer experience 
• Enable developers to retain their investments in their Synergy solutions
• Evolve Synergy/DE on all supported platforms: Linux/Unix, OpenVMS, and Windows
• Incorporate ideas from Synergy developers
• Keep our Synergy DBL integration up-to-date with the latest Microsoft Visual Studio® tools
• Deliver frequent, incremental updates

Release Frequency

New Synergy/DE runtime revisions with new features are typically released every 12 to 18 months, and patches with fixes every 3 to 6 months. New SDI developer builds (Synergy DBL Integration with Visual Studio) are released when new features are available and to support Microsoft Visual Studio releases. SDI releases support a maximum of three concurrent Visual Studio versions (the latest release of each version). SDI requires Synergy/DE 10.3.3d for development, and it enables you to target any Synergy runtime version back to 10.1.1d for Synergy .NET and 9.5.3 for traditional Synergy. New Harmony Core versions are released intermittently as new features are available.

Current Focus

We are currently focused on extending Synergy/DE in the following areas:

• Developer productivity. Enhancing the developer experience for creating traditional Synergy applications in Visual Studio, as well as keeping up with Microsoft to provide the latest Visual Studio features to developers creating traditional Synergy and .NET applications
• Web services. Extending our Harmony Core open-source software development framework to give developers more capabilities for building RESTful web services APIs to expose Synergy data and logic to other applications
• .NET Core. Enhancing .NET Core support throughout the Synergy/DE product set to provide portability for Synergy .NET code
• DevOps infrastructure. Enhancing Synergex development infrastructure to improve product quality and improve our hotfix delivery process on Windows
• Cloud licensing. Researching how to support licensing Synergy applications in the cloud

Note that security is not a current focus for our roadmap as our current products already enable you to build high security into your applications. We remain committed to enabling application security, and we’ll add features to future roadmaps as new security needs arise.

Upcoming Synergy/DE Releases

A timeline of planned Synergy/DE releases and their primary features

Other Features Planned for 2020

Additional features planned for 2020 incremental releases

.NET Core 3.1 support across product set

• .NET API
• xfNetLink .NET
• ddlib
• synxml
• Guidance and improvements for moving from AppDomain in legacy .NET to assembly load context in .NET Core

SDI enhancements

• Visual studio SMC project type for building the SMC from XML files or dbl2xml generated files
• Improved Intellisense experience

ISAM enhancements

• Ability to add an index (or add a segment to an existing index ) while a REV6 ISAM file is in use
• Ability to extend a compressed or variable-record REV6 ISAM file while it’s in use

Other features

• I/O performance metrics for traditional Synergy runtimes
  • When moving to the cloud, I/O and network resources need metrics to determine success and cost. These metrics will allow I/O rate, throughput, and latency metrics to be derived.
• Enhanced delivery of hotfixes for Windows (full installers)
• Unix IP license manager to get subscription licenses from Windows license servers; will enhance the DevOps scenarios using Kubernetes or Docker containers

For research

• A separate developer tools installer on Windows for SDE (similar to SDI)
  • Allows built tools to be improved without changing runtime version and lessens runtime installer size.
• Simple compile-time language support for interfaces in traditional Synergy
• .NET Core on Linux (deliver in 2021)
• Support in Visual Studio for Synergy projects using WPF and Winforms designers for .NET Core

Features Under Consideration

The following features are under consideration for research and development. We are also reviewing other features that have been submitted to the Ideas forum in Synergex’s Resource Center Community. If you have ideas for improving or extending Synergy/DE, we encourage you to post them on the Ideas site for consideration. Also, if you are interested in any of the ideas that are already posted, we encourage you to add your input and votes for those features in the forum.

• VSI OpenVMS
  • VMS advanced file system
  • VMS x64 port
• Coordinated ISAM file atomicity framework  with auto-rollback
• Data at rest encryption of .ism and .is1 files
• Windows installations use ProgramData for items edited by users and shared x86/x64
  • Synergy.ini and GENESIS_HOME
• Synergy DBL Integration for Visual Studio (SDI) / VSCode
  • CodeGen as a NuGet package for the build system
  • CodeGen template editor extension
• Code analysis tooling
  • Ability to find unused code
  • Static data flow analysis to determine what other locations need to have their size updated when resizing a record/structure/field

The information in this product roadmap is based on current information and expectations; actual results may differ materially. Synergex may modify this plan at any time, in full or in part. Synergex assumes no liability for financial or other decisions that may be made as a result of the information in this document.