I did a short talk at the start of today’s ClarionLive session. John and Arnold had posted that I’d be there and the room filled up really fast. In case you missed it, here is what I covered:

1. SoftVelocity and ClarionLive are co-organizing the next Clarion DevCon, which will be held in Denver Colorado, (same location as the last ClarionLive conference) for November 11-13, 2011. It’s sure to be a great event! I’ve heard the venue is incredible, and I know the content will be even better. In the weeks ahead we’ll be announcing the details on the session topics.

2. The initial early release of Clarion8 is going out today!
A few notes on the C8 release:
– You’ll get your chance to try out all the new UI features, like the Gradient support on Toolbar controls, the new Slider control, the 3-state Checkbox control, the vastly improved look for disabled images and icons, PROP:NoThemed support to allow transparent SHEET when the application is using a manifest, and much more.
– All told there are already over 65 new features and improvements, as well as about 150 fixes and changes.

– You’ll have some long sought after improvements in the IDE; like remembering the last edited EMBED point, and the ability to edit data as Text. But you’ll have to delve into the readme for the complete list. A lot of hard work has gone into this release, and we hope you will love it.

– What to expect after the install:

• Clarion8 inherits all Clarion versions set up in Clarion 7, so you can start using the Clarion8 IDE right away
• You should check with the 3rd party vendors that you use – but if you copy your .ClarionAccessory folder from your Clarion7.3 install folder into your Clarion8 folder most of your add-on tools should be ready to use as-is in a C8 App. The exceptions are those that have explicit checks for the Clarion version number, unless they use a greater than or equal condition. Also any tools that ship local link LIBs should be rebuilt just as a matter of routine sanity/safety.
• The Dictionary format was updated in Clarion8, so expect an upgrade message upon open of the Dct or App

And that’s about it, this update should be absolutely painless, and it brings some very nice new features that your end-users can see, and some big productivity gains.

Back to the announcements:

3. Next week we’ll release an update for Clarion.Net – no AppGen.Net yet, but it will deliver the bridging technology that allows you to very easily call .Net procedures from your Clarion Win32 programs without the use of COM or C++ wrappers.

4. I’ll be doing short talks on ClarionLive at least twice per month in order to share the latest news on what we’re up to, and in general what’s happening with Clarion. I can’t thank John and Arnold enough times for the incredible resource they have created for the entire Clarion community!