Monthly Archives: January 2013

New C8 update is on its way

A new update is going out today for Clarion 8 so keep a watch on your email for download instructions. There are improvements, fixes and changes across the board; from the IDE itself, template updates, driver fixes, and more, including code to resolve selection of really long (mostly identical) printer names.

News (short version)

I was working on a much longer post when I was alerted that if I didn’t post something (anything) real soon, then some heads were going to explode 🙂 —
so here is the shortest version I could quickly come up with, and I’ll follow with several small-ish posts.

On the Win32 side:
Expect a new release of Clarion8 out this week – possibly later today if all goes according to plan. Clarion9 is getting close to where we’ll release it to
an initial group of alpha testers, that being a precursor to widespread beta and official release.

On the .Net side
Clarion.Net is being updated to .Net 4.x compatibility, while still maintaining support for earlier .Net versions. It seems most of our developers are strongly interested in more capabilities to share code between .Net and Win32, and we’re working on further improvements in that area (we already support a builtin system for exposing .Net assemblies to Win32). With the push towards mobile and tablets, we’re working on templates that can address that very real need.

As we all know MS has an established history of pushing a new technology as the next “big thing” and then sweeping it under the rug a few years later. We don’t know if Microsoft will back off its Windows 8 strategy in the near future, or a few years down the road (like Zune and Silverlight). But after following MS down the path of WebForms, WinForms and Compact Forms only to have them mostly killed by MS, we’re avidly avoiding the MS trail of dead technology.

So in closing I want to suggest that jQuery, jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile(touch-optimized version of the jQuery framework) for smartphones and tablets will allow you to create a single app that can run on all popular smartphone and tablet devices (and desktop platforms). jQuery supports iOs, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Symbian, Palm webOS and other devices. So how does that fit into Clarion.Net and Clarion Win32? Well I’ll have to explain that in a separate post.