Small adjustment to the release plan; we targeted the 7.1 release for today 12/18, but yesterday we fixed two bugs in the window library and the QA team requires 2 full days to redo the regression test suite. We realize there are a lot of folks very eager to get their hands on the new release, and rather then make you wait until late Monday or possibly Tuesday, we’re making 7.1 available today to all subscription holders as a “pre-release”. If no regressions are found the pre-release will in fact become the official release.

Another good reason for letting the release out today; all 3rd party blackbox products must be rebuilt with the 7.1 compiler, so this pre-release will give those vendors a headstart on doing so.

In another post I received a comment about this item in the release notes; “CHANGE: FILEs declared within a Procedure are now Private data to that Procedure”, and I promised to provide some further details about that change.

The linker has been improved in 7.1, whereas in every prior release going back to earliest Clarion compiler/linker, reporting of “duplicate symbol” by the linker was dependent upon the order of files in the link list. Meaning that the absence of “duplicate symbol” errors did not necessarily mean that all was OK. When this problem was exposed and fixed, it immediately uncovered two previously “hidden” problems in some of the libsrc code we ship, and exposed some problems in 3rd party products used in our regression testing, and we do expect that a few of you will find your own “hidden” problems when you rebuild with 7.1.

How about an example of the type of problem the 7.1 linker will now catch? OK.  Assume that there are 2 very different procedures but with the exact same public name in 2 different Member modules. Nothing can be done by the linker to allow them both, but the old linker could miss that error dependent upon the order of source files and presence of resource files in the link list. The solution for this type of error is easy, one of the procedures can be renamed, or the PRIVATE attribute could be added to their prototypes. In general, it’s better to use the PRIVATE attribute for all procedures and data objects local to a member module, unless they are exported or used in other modules.  If you do run into an unexpected duplicate symbol error, don’t panic, its easy to fix and will make for a better product.

We’ve taken your suggestions and your feature requests and delivered on them with 7.1; from the ultra-small things like changing toolbar icons, to the big things like the new functionality in the property grid, the new window previewer, automatic App saving and recovery functionality, Windows 7 manifest support in the linker/templates, a new Report Writer, ….. well its a very long list of improvements which I won’t repeat right now.

7.1 is a fantastic update; more reliable, more stable, and more fully-featured then any other Clarion release, and we’re sure you’ll love it.