.Net Ledger Development Roadmap

This is a roadmap for development of next NLedger releases.

NLedger 0.7

Code completion and verification; improve builds.

[Complete] Code completion: add arbitrary precision arithmetic to deal with Amount quantities; enable validation of big numbers in Ledger unit tests;
[Complete] Code verification: process all TODO/TBD/In Progress/NotImplemented markers in code;
[Complete] Code verification: process warnings in unit test projects;
[Complete] Code completion: verify and complete DEBUG and TRACE messages;
[Complete] Code completion: handle special options (verify, verbose, memory, init-file);
[Complete] Code completion: add man command (show current Ledger documentation in browser);
[Complete] Update the source code and tests to the latest Ledger version (branch NEXT);
[Complete] Build: configure VSTS builds on hosted agents;
[Complete] Build: VSTS: add automatic commits for created packages and build logs; publish MD5 hashes;
[Complete] Build: VSTS: create DEV branches and configure Continuous Integration builds for them;
[Complete] Build: improve MD5 to HTML conversion; add automatic updates for doc files (licensing, bug tracking);
[Complete] Bug fixing: prompt in the interactive mode;
[Complete] Bug fixing: fix filtering by categories in --debug option;
[Complete] Deploy package: add interactive examples in a console;
[Complete] Deploy package: add a setup console;
[Complete] Build: add creating MSI packages (Wix);

Support third-party software development, technology modernization and code completion

[Complete] Update the source code and tests to the latest Ledger version (done, updated to 3.2.1);
[Complete] Enhancement: present a development API for embedding NLedger functionality into third-party applications (Service API). Includes:
- abstraction and virtualization level (virtual file system, console, environment and devices);
- extendable ANSI preprocessor to encapsulate colorization;
- extendable configuration;
- application service model (engine host, session and request object management);
- isolated thread-safe model with cancellation support;
[Complete] Publish NLedger in NuGet repository;
[Complete] Technology modernization: support Support .Net SDK. Includes:
- migration to SDK-style projects;
- migration from MSTest to xUnits;
- generating and verification .Net Framework 4.5, .Net Standard 2.0 and .Net Core 3.1 binaries;
- multi-platform capabilities: build, testing and functioning on Windows, Linux and OSX;
[Complete] Bug fixing (GH#2, GH#7);

Extending functional and data integration API; two-way integration with other language environments; code completion

[Complete] Create Extensibility API allowing seamless integration with Ledger domain model for external software
[Complete] Create .Net extension that integrates the Ledger runtime with external .Net applications
[Complete] Create Python extension that allows to extend Ledger data files with Python functions
[Complete] Create .Net Ledger Python module that provides access to Ledger domain objects in a Python interpreter session
[Complete] Code completion: enable Ledger tests that require Python integration;
Create Powershell extension that allows to extend Ledger data files with Powershell functions
Bug fixing: solve issues with .Net date parser error messages; consider creating an own date parser; enable corresponded Ledger unit and integration tests;
Bug fixing: solve issues with file names in error messages (absolute vs relative); simplify corresponded Ledger integration tests;
Update the source code and tests to the latest Ledger version (branch NEXT);
Add a build profile that supports .Net 5

Bug fixing, code completion, optimization and stabilization

Code completion: complete well-formatted code documentation, enable generating XML documentation file and include into NuGet package.
Code completion: add localization capabilities for error and warning messages; verify and process Ledger methods gettext_, throw_;
Code optimization (analyze efficient of lookup implementation and other critical places);
General performance analyzing and optimization;
Code stabilization and bug fixing;

Features planned for future releases

Enhancement (Service API): add support of semantical tokenization for NLedger output;
Enhancement (Service API): add auxiliary classes that help to build textual Ledger commands programmatically;
Enhancement (Service API): add auxiliary classes that can render Ledger Journal from a Journal object instance
Code completion: add integrated pager; add complete support of external pagers; solve issues with colorization; simulate "cat" pager and enable corresponded Ledger test;