What is the future of support for forms in 64-bit? The manual says that one of limitations of Manifold 64-bit is: "No common ActiveX controls for forms. The Manifold ActiveX control works OK and may be used by programmers."

Is this a case of waiting on Microsoft to update ActiveX for 64-bit or something else? Any time frames for having forms working on 64-bit?

The future of forms in general and 64-bit forms in particular is .NET and Windows Forms, not ActiveX controls.

Thanks Adam but being a baby programmer I don't understand the implications. Any idea when forms might work in Manifold and will the forms I'm making now need to be reconstructed?

If you can, move to .NET forms. If you can't, there will be a migration path for you and, yes, you will have to reconstruct your forms with us helping as best as we can. No word regarding the dates.

Thank you kindly

This is an example of a Manifold script creating a .NET form.

Does that imply a replacement for the ActiveX control in the not-to-distant future?

Teaching the Machine

It means that at some point we will add an analogous Windows Forms control.

What about debugging Adam? Is there any chance that debugging could be built-in as well?

You mean the debugging of .NET scripts (and forms) built-in into Manifold? This is in the plans but not in the near ones. In the meantime, we are looking for ways to better interact with Visual Studio .NET.

"looking for ways to better interact with Visual Studio .NET"

That would be great as all the reading in this forum and in the manual seems to point that using Visual Studio is the best way to go. I installed it and couldn't really figure out how to make it useful and so I've fallen back into doing my work in VBScript. Is there any recommended reading or maybe there are some simple pointers for when getting started?

It takes some time to watch and follow Microsofts introductory videos on VB .NET or C# but they get you going. MSDN is full of examples.

In VBScript and VBA there a reserved names for functions called when an event is thrown. In .NET you have to show the system with function should digest with event (similar to avenues dialog designer extension, in case you know). This was the first majore step I had to learn. Manifold's add-in example is not the worst because you know about the rest.

As hax0r as this is, I've found most of my problems can be "debugged" by wrapping my entire script in a try/catch with it dumping exceptions and their related stack into a MessageBox. I just do this as SOP now. Of course, you don't get breakpoints or watches or anything cute like that, but these are of limited appeal.

Yes, that is what I was getting at and thanks for the answer Adam.