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
• Provide Synergy integration 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), as well as any Synergy runtime version back to 10.1.1d for Synergy .NET and 9.5.3 for traditional Synergy.

Current Focus

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

• Cloud-based license key server. Simplifying license management processes by providing automatic installation and update of Synergy product keys on customer systems
• Traditional Synergy development in Visual Studio. Enhancing the developer experience for creating traditional Synergy applications in Visual Studio
• Visual Studio Integration. Keeping up with Microsoft to provide the latest Visual Studio features to developers creating traditional Synergy and .NET applications
• WiX installations. Migrating Synergy/DE installations to the WiX toolset to provide a better and more standard installation experience
• Security. Enhancing security, specifically service security (xfServer and xfServerPlus)
• Cloud licensing. Researching how to support licensing Synergy applications in the cloud

Upcoming Synergy/DE Releases

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

*Depends on third-party (e.g., VSI and Microsoft) release schedule

Other Synergy/DE 11 Features

Additional features planned for version 11

Security

• TLS 1.2 compliance enforced by default across product set  (TLS 1.1 will be new minimum)
• Improved security compliance for xf ServerPlus
• Windows runtime and xfServer built for Spectre compliance (addressing hardware security vulnerability)
• Synergy built with upgraded tooling on Linux and Windows (C runtime libraries, .NET Framework features, Visual Studio UCRT, and Linux GCC compiler)
• Improved xfODBC security with new dbcreate option
  • 128-byte passwords encrypted using SHA256
  • Industry-standard grant/revoke syntax for tables to users
  • Default to continue with GENESIS_USERS

Traditional Synergy

• New string methods
  • More overloads for IndexOf, LastIndexOf, Insert, Substring, and Replace
  • IsNullOrEmpty, IsNullOrWhiteSpace, TrimStart, TrimEnd, Split, and Remove
• Console.Writeline and Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine
• Compiler updates
  • Extension methods,  ? an d ?? operators (targeting v11 runtime) , ^nameof()
• Debugger ability to examine cast objects in path with multiple casts
• HTTP API chunked encoding, Head and Patch methods, base 64 encode/decode

SDI enhancements

• “Find All References” improvements to match C#
• Repository project type order-independent schema load

24×7 operation support

• xfServerPlus no longer runs under the System account
• Windows backup service for registering with backup provider and synbackup
  • Automatically sets/resets synbackup to freeze I/O in conjunction with third-party backup software
  • CodeExchange script examples for Unix
• Improved ISAM reliability and performance
  • Improved isutl with quicker rebuild
  • Xcallable isutl
  • Ability for isutl to rebuild files in place while open
  • Isutl option to repair just out of sync files

Requirements

• AIX 7.1 new minimum
• Installation may require small changes if you wrap Synergy/DE installation
• Windows C runtime upgrade  and .NET Framework 7.2 required, Synergy clients will likely need upgrades.

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 , Synbackup, and GENESIS_HOME
• Traditional development
  • Composer and Workbench become 64-bit-only products
• .NET runtimes
  • Support for .NET Core on Linux and the .NET API.
• Synergy DBL Integration for Visual Studio (SDI) / VSCode
  • CodeGen as a NuGet package for the build system
  • CodeGen template editor extension
  • Integration for traditional Synergy in Visual Studio unit tests
  • VSCode support
• Code analysis tooling
  • A utility based on a Visual Studio solution to find all places a variable is used, including antecedents
    • Facilitates changing size of a variable by showing all uses
  • Find unused code