Category Archives: Clarion 8

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.

C8 ready for Win8 and more

A new release of C8 is on its way out. This release has been through an extensive test cycle, both internally, and working with many key Clarion developers. Most apps will see an immediate performance boost in screen/control drawing, especially when opening very complex windows, as well as a much cleaner rendering of closely spaced and overlapped controls.

Windows 8 is due to release next week, and we’ve added new support to the RTL, compiler, debugger and Templates, so you’ll be able to detect Win 8, and properly manifest your apps for Win 8.  All in all there are 100+ fixes/changes/features in this release, and with the lengthy test cycle this release has been through we’re confident you’ll be able to make use of them right away.

An updated release for C8 is on its way

A new update is going out today for Clarion 8.  This is a pretty significant release in that it has some important speed improvements for drawing complex windows. For this release we worked closely with a couple dozen Clarion devs testing their real-world windows using internal builds.  This was a win-win situation for all of us — we received immediate feedback as we released iterative changes to the RTL, and the developers who participated were able to test their biggest and baddest windows with the new RTL.

In a previous post I wrote about the changes we made for flicker suppression, but that’s only part of the story.  In addition we spent a lot of cycles working on improving the speed of opening and repainting complex windows, the elimination of extra sets of caption buttons being drawn by the OS into the App Frame, and a number of other MDI related issues.  The bottom line is that you’ll see a nice improvement in your Apps perceived performance, with just a recompile and no other changes (and its an improvement that your end users will surely notice).  The improvements to the RTL actually came from retro-fitting code being developed for Clarion 9 back into the C8 codebase.

Speed and flicker control aren’t the only items addressed in this release. There are also fixes and changes across the board from the IDE itself, template changes, drivers and more.

New functionality challenges new release

The new functionality I mentioned in the previous post took a bite out of our planned release timeline.  The functionality in question is the .Net implementation of our Win32 BrowseBox Behavior implementation.  We had aimed to have the support implemented across platforms (desktop/web) and across the data access models (ADO,Linq,FileDrivers).   This is what we have for the web side:

BrowseBox Behavior for the web

 

as you can see its very similar to what we have on the Win32 side of things.  For ASP.Net there are some new properties that are needed.  In particular we have to account for the stateless environment – each page access occurs as if it were the first time it has ever happened.   Hence the options for where the page will get its range limit value (as shown in the dropdown – and sure to expand shortly).

The BrowseBox Behavior implementation will bring a lot of code-free functionality to your web and desktop apps.  We’ll wrap this up tomorrow and release with whatever functionality exists (check the readme for the release state).

Another area where you’ll notice a huge improvement is the processing of the T4 template registry – it is now about 90% faster!

And we also have some nice news for the upcoming Win32 release but I’ll post about that tomorrow.