Clarion

Today we issued a pre-release of version 7.3 to 3^rd party vendors, and in addition to a good number of fixes and improvements in both RTL and IDE, there is another noteworthy change.  The convention for naming of Clarion DLLs and Libs has always been “C” plus the major version number, so we have C60Run.dll, C70Run.dll, and so on.  The reasoning behind this came from the earliest release of Clarion for Windows, at a time when the internals of both RTL and File drivers were changing quite frequently.  And in order to ensure that programs didn’t crash because of these internal changes, there was versioning code that diligently checked the version number of the RTL used in any binary against the currently loaded RTL.  This version checking very often required you to do a complete rebuild of all your binaries even when no internals in the RTL or Drivers (or Compiler) had changed to require it, except for the external version number.

Now in Clarion 7.3 we’ve made some changes for the better. The visible change is that in Version 7.3 the naming convention used for Clarion DLLs and LIBs is no longer version specific. Now in 7.3 we use a prefix of “CLA” for all our binaries. For example:

C70RUN.DLL is now CLARUN.DLL
C70RUNL.LIB is now CLARUNL.LIB
C70TPS.DLL is now CLATPS.DLL
And so on.

But the changes you can’t see are where the benefits can be found.  In continuing to reduce the lines between product releases, our version checking code has had a makeover.  Now we maintain an internal version for the RTL that is separate from the external visible version number, and assuming that no changes to internal structures accessible from the outside world have been made, and the RTL internal number hasn’t been incremented, then rebuilding of binaries won’t be required.

That means, for example, the following:
If a user has his Exe plus 20 Dlls built with 7.3.7852 and a few weeks later we release 7.3.8011 – and it has some fix he needs, he can just copy the 7.3.8001 RTL and drivers into his app folder and run his app without a rebuild of his binaries. We see huge benefits in productivity ahead with this change.

For the project settings of your .Apps, the change is seamless – you don’t have to take any action for items the templates have added to the project.  If you use the macro expansion symbols those are also updated to return the new naming convention.

Of course if a rebuild of binaries is needed, a message (not an error) will be displayed, or if the incorrect RTL is used it will also just show a message alerting the user about the use of the incorrect version.

Along with this version change the SYSTEM properties; PROP:ExeVersion and the PROP:LibVersion are also changed and extended, see the Help file for details.

This week we have been working hard on the final testing and closedown of Clarion 7.3, and much more.  With Thanksgiving tomorrow, it’s time to take a little break to reflect on the many things that we have to be thankful for, most important customers like you!

Our office will be closed from 11/25 thru 11/28 for the Thanksgiving Holiday, and will reopen on Monday, November 29th.

From all of us at SoftVelocity, have a safe and restful holiday weekend, and the very best wishes from our families to yours!

The Clarion User conference was a great success. I presented the keynote remotely, and in this post I’ll cover the highlights of the presentation.

First on the Clarion for Windows Win32 side – I mentioned that the next release for Clarion 7 will be version 7.3, and in that release we’ll deliver several key RTL bug fixes and additional fixes for ReportWriter and the IDE. The 7.3 release will be ready to go out around mid-month.  I also did a brief demo of Clarion8, I only touched upon some of the new features already implemented, such as the new “edit as text” mode for the Data pad, and the new locators added to every list in the Dictionary editor (and added to the Data pad as well).  I also announced that we’ll be making an early access release for Clarion8 available to everyone with a subscription, and that will be ready by the end of this month.

On the .Net side I showed a short preview of the .Net Application Generator UI, and Pierre did further demonstrations during the conference. I explained that we are busy writing the .Net templates – and that the process of writing and testing the templates leads to bug fixes in the code generation engine.  With lots of hard work, and a bit of luck, we hope you’ll see a beta release in December.  I also mentioned that we’ll be putting all the templates (.Net and Win32) into a repository that will be open to the community. Doing this will allow Clarion developers instant access to the latest templates, and any template fixes or changes, and it will also allow Clarion developers to contribute their own templates and to participate in extending and refining existing templates. Later this week I’ll post another blog with some screenshots of the AppGen.Net UI – and as always we look forward to your feedback.

We just released another update for 7.2 with a nice mix of fixes and changes to both the IDE and the RTL.

You can check the readme list here

We just released an update for 7.2 with a nice mix of fixes and changes to both the IDE and the RTL. If you are a template writer then note that we’ve bumped the template version number to 7.2/7200.

You can check the readme list here