RemObjects Software has announced Oxygene 5.2, the next iteration of its Object Pascal compiler and development environment. With this release, the software enjoys new distribution variants and new features.
In addition to Oxygene for .NET (distributed by Embarcadero under the "Embarcadero Prism" brand name) and Oxygene for Java, a third edition now emerges under the codename "Nougat". Designed for Apple's Cocoa development platform for Macs and iOS devices, Nougat is currently in internal alpha with the release planned for sometime in early or mid 2013.
In terms of new features, Oxygene 5.2's Fix-It IDE-integrated compiler feature has been ramped up with a single click "Fix Them All" button that allows developers to fix all occurrences of a given problem throughout a project at once.
The firm is also introducing a new "Automatically Fix these problems" feature that, for a select number of issues, lets you instruct the compiler to just go ahead and automatically adjust your code to apply the necessary fixes.
According to the RemObjects blog, "Once again, this is helpful mostly for smaller but frequently made mistakes, such as a missing var or a mistyped identifier case. If you enable this option (on a per-message basis, and off by default), the IDE will just automatically take care of correcting these issues for you after the compile finishes."
Oxygene 5.2 officially supports the release version of Visual Studio 2012 and Oxygene will offer to install the brand new Visual Studio 2012 shell.
RemObjects chief architect Marc Hoffman says that along with the new IDE, Oxygene gains a range of new capabilities enabled by Visual Studio 2012, such as the new "Preview Tabs" in the editor when selecting files in Solution Explorer, color-coded IDE status when coding, building debugging, and — most importantly says Hoffman — support for creating true Metro applications for Windows 8 and for Windows RT-based ARM tablets such as the upcoming Microsoft Surface, in Visual Studio 2012 Professional or higher.
