After over a year of hard work, the next OpenSpan release is upon us. This morning we released the public beta of OpenSpan 4.5. For the first time, OpenSpan Studio will be free for anyone to download and evaluate.

For this release we rewrote our design environment to utilize Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX). OpenSpan Studio will now be available as both a Visual Studio 2008 plug-in and a stand-alone IDE. All OpenSpan developers will benefit from new features enabled by VSX such as source control integration, undo-redo and project references. However, we’re most excited by the new features we can offer .NET developers.

In 4.5, we have changed the output of OpenSpan projects to be .NET assemblies. At design-time, we still utilize XML documents to store the data, but we have added a build step that generates and compiles a class for the project and each project item (adapter, automation, etc.). The generated classes are identical to the classes utilized in OpenSpan automations. Anything you can do in OpenSpan automations you can now do with C#, VB or any .NET language.

So how do we anticipate people using this? Well, currently we have a number of customers who embed our functionality into new or existing windows forms or WPF applications they have created. Our new features will make this integration simple and seamless, enabling more complex integrations than ever before. In particular, with our re-parenting control, you can quickly and easily integrate web pages, terminal screens and Java applications into your composite application or mash-up not only visually, but functionally as well. Anytime you are creating a new .NET application, you should think about the benefits using OpenSpan can bring.

Needless to say this is a big step for us, one that has necessitated not just code changes but organizational changes as well. In order to support the needs of developers, we have introduced a new developer portal with forums and code samples and also a new incident-based support model. I hope you’ll check out the beta and give us feedback on the forums. To get started, check out the OpenSpan Community.