The Road Ahead

Many longstanding applications have roots in now surpassed technologies, practices and programming languages. Work on Camino and its' various dependencies started over fifteen years ago and was written in the language we were most familar with, Visual Basic.NET (VB).

A lot has changed since the first working builds of Camino, and VB is now effectively a dead language. Microsoft has ceased development and there will no additional features will be added to it. It will remain support for at least until 2029, but anything written in it will be unable to leverage new tools and functionality within the .NET architecture.

Consequently, we have engaged in a long-term program of converting and rebuilding our applications and libraries to C#. This was not something that could be done overnight and has had to be done alongside the normal day-to-day upgrades, updates and application release schedule.

With the 19th July 2024 release of Camino (version 2.5.3555), it and all Calzada Media dependent libraries are now written in C#. In the coming weeks, we will be rolling out this version to active Camino customers.

This isn't the end of development for Camino. We've got a significant number of planned upgrades and new features we are planning to roll out in the coming months.

It's nearly ready! We're currently putting the finishing touches to the latest version of Camino CMS. Camino is our own content management system, or CMS, and version 0.5.3 is our best release yet containing new features, capabilities and improvements. Camino can now be found powering a diverse range of websites from personal blogs through to complex intranet applications.

If you are an existing Camino customer and hold a current support contract, you will be entitled to an upgrade of your Camino installation to 0.5.3. We will contact individual customers to discuss upgrade arrangements once 0.5.3 has been released.

Although v0.5.3 will be the stable release of Camino for the near term, we are already planning for subsequent versions. If you have suggestions on improvements or new capabilities, please get in touch.