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The CIDC 2017 schedule has been posted. Sessions include:
A preview of Clarion 11
Two H5 sessions
A number of SQL topics including conversions, debugging, profiling, etc.
A call to Code Craftsmanship
Database backup, restore and integrity
Template writing
Home automation and Amazon Echo
Google analytics in desktop apps
and much more, including third party presentations and of course two days of exceptional NetTalk training by CapeSoft.
Check out the full schedule here. https://www.cidc2017.…
CIDC 2017 is on! https://www.cidc2017.com Register by March 31 and save $300 https://www.cidc2017.com/pricing.htm on the conference registration, or $550 https://www.cidc2017.com/pricing.htm on both the conference and the training.
Another good reason to register early - get your room at the Rosen! While there are other hotels nearby, there's nothing quite like staying on site.
See you in Florida!
I suppose it's always dangerous to say something's permanent, especially when talking about technology, but for the foreseeable future I've moved ClarionMag to this site, clarionmag.jira.com.
Why here?
For some years now I've used Atlassian's Confluence content management https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence system to deliver Clarion Magazine. It's a terrific platform - I love it and recommend it to anyone looking for a powerful and easy to use CMS.…
It's hard for me to imagine a Clarion developer who hasn't heard of Russ Eggen. A Clarion user for 30 years, he was both a consultant and an instructor for Topspeed Corporation. He was also a founding member of SoftVelocity when that company formed in 2000. He left SoftVelocity the following year to start his own company, RadFusion Inc.
Russ was a tireless Clarion advocate who helped many Clarion developers improve their skills. He taught numerous classes,…
In Part 1 https://www.clarionmag.com/display/clarion/Creating+a+feature+toggle+library%2C+part+1 Dave Harms introduced the idea of a feature toggle library, and wrote that the starting point for Clarion development should not be the data dictionary. In many cases the data dictionary comes at the very end of the process. But If the data dictionary doesn't come first, what does? There are a lot of different answers to that question, depending on what kind of application you're developing,…
What do you do when a customer requests a change or a new feature in your product that only applies to that one customer? Broadly speaking, you have two options: a feature branch or a feature toggle, and for most situations feature toggles win hands down. But feature toggles can get complex - does the feature toggle apply only at startup, or can it be changed at runtime? Does it apply to everyone or only certain users?…
I've added another Clarion code smell to the list: file aliases. Yes, there are times when you need them, but there's also a good chance they're the wrong answer to the problem you're trying to solve. https://www.clarionmag.com/display/clarion/Avoiding+code+smell%2C+updated+with+selected+new+%28that+is%2C+old%29+fragrances#aliases
He's old. He's grouchy. He's hard of hearing and not wearing his hearing aids. And. For a limited time, he's back.
Rick Smith has started a GoFundMe campaign to help raise $12,000 for a cancer treatment for Russ Eggen that isn't covered by Russ's health insurance. Read more about it and contribute here! https://www.gofundme.com/2apu69r4
You probably don't need any incentive to give Russ a hand, but here are some anyway:
For each qualifying donation Pratik Patel will provide a copy of his CYA IDE tool. CYA exports a TXA of your app every time you build, so it Covers Your App.…
SoftVelocity has released a new H5 AppBroker to go along with the H5 support in the latest Clarion 10 EE release. H5 uses the long-standing AppBroker product combined with Bootstrap to convert standard Clarion apps to web apps. Because Bootstrap is a response web framework, Clarion apps with the H5 treatment can be viewed on mobile as well as desktop devices. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLweTGzUgLC-QedaF6PtQD0vjh5oY2QMvQ More to come....
Does your code give off the sweet fragrance of a rose garden? Perhaps it's closer to the other end of the aromatic spectrum. Check out our updated Clarion-specific list of common code smells.
So you're running Clarion on a solid state drive and performance is terrific. But you've heard those rumors about how it's possible to wear out SSDs with too many writes. Should you worry? Dave Harms crunches the numbers and comes up with a surprising result. Try out the spreadsheet and see how long your SSD will last.
The office will be closed from March 23-31 but I will be checking email periodically. Please allow several days for subscriptions to be processed.
Dave Harms
Publisher
Calling .NET code from Clarion doesn't have to be complicated or nerve-wracking, especially if you're passing and returning integers and/or string data. As Bill Florek shows, all you really need is a third party library for your .NET assembly and an updated LibMaker courtesy of Brahn Patridge.
A first cut of the rebuilt ClarionMag archive http://archive.clarionmag.com/ is online. There's still lots of work to be done, but you can log in, and search for and read articles. Other links do not yet work, and the look and feel is still pretty raw.
As you probably know the archive.clarionmag.com http://archive.clarionmag.com/ site has been offline for several months now. It broke badly when we moved the site to a new server. My initial efforts to get the archive back online were unsuccessful and eventually I realized that a proper fix was going to take a lot more work.
When I first wrote what is now the archive site I began with Castle Monorail, a Ruby on Rails-inspired framework for .NET web development.…
So what really is going on with the archive site, and is there a change in subscriptions coming?
Do you test your code primarily by running the app that contains the code? If so, you may be a professional debuggerer. Scott Nimrod may be a .NET guy, but this question and others in his recent blog post https://bizmonger.wordpress.com/2015/07/29/are-you-a-professional-debuggerer/ make it sound like he's talking directly to the Clarion community.
What's the alternative? For starters, get your code out of embed points, which is the very worst place it could be.…
We've had difficulties with the archive.clarionmag.com site since moving to this new server, and it's becoming clear that the long term solution is to upgrade the site software (built with an early release of ASP.NET MVC) to the currently available tooling. This work has begun. Thanks again for your patience.
Bob Z's Friday sessions bookended the last day of the conference, and included Q & A and the future of Clarion. This is a recreation of a report I created shortly after the conference, the final draft of which was lost in a server crash a few days later.
We're continuing to have server issues following our move to a new host. The archive.clarionmag.com https://www.clarionmag.com/http:/archive.clarionmag.com site is temporarily offline while we work on a solution. Thanks for your patience.
I'm back home and easing back into a normal schedule (whatever that is) after last week's conference activities. Here's a quick look at day two, with more detailed notes to follow.
CIDC got off to a bit of a wobbly start with some technical issues, but those were resolved very quickly and we've had some excellent presentations with much more to come. I've been accumulating notes and will have some coverage up on the site this evening.
With apologies to John Hickey and his excellent line of "Ultimate" Clarion utilities, I've begun working on a page describing what I believe is the ultimate (or more accurately penultimate, since we never really get there) way to do Clarion development in the 21st century. Let me know what you think. Much has changed in the software development world since Clarion first hit the shelves (for one thing, there used to actually be shelves),…
Here's a grab bag of tips and techniques from our Databases & SQL e-book:
Clarion File Access Basics
Managing Table Opens In ABC
Creating ODBC Data Sources At Runtime
Securing Remote Database Connections With SSH Tunneling
Using Client-Side Triggers In Clarion 6
Working With Control Files
Changing Dictionaries
Alias - Who Was That Masked File?
Propitious Memory Corruption
Detecting Duplicate Records
NAME() Comes Of Age
Ever wonder what's really going on inside the file-related ABC classes, and why? Find out from the architect!
Inside ABC: FieldPairsClass and BufferedPairsClass
Inside ABC: The FileManager
Inside ABC: The RelationManager
Inside ABC: The ViewManager
SQL Server is a frequent choice among Clarion devs. Check out these articles in our e-book:
Migrating The Inventory Application To SQL Server
Using SQL Server’s Data Transformation Services
Converting Data With Linked Servers
Converting The Inventory Example - Calling Stored Procedures
SQL Identity: Another Approach
Creating Utilities For MS SQL 2000
Generating MS SQL Server Side Triggers
Date Filtering with MS SQL
Oracle isn't as commonly used among Clarion devs as MSSQL, MySQL and the like, but it still gets some coverage in our e-book:
Referential Integrity In Oracle
AutoNumbering In Oracle
Transactions In Oracle
A lot of Clarion devs use open source databases. Here are the MySQL/PostgreSQL articles from the e-book:
Using Clarion With MySQL
MySQL/MyODBC Notes
MySQL: InnoDB Tables And Transactions
Large Table Performance in MySQL
Getting Started With PostgreSQL
Part 3 of the Databases & SQL e-book (now available to all subscribers https://www.clarionmag.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=25591828) includes the following general SQL articles:
An Introduction To SQL
Getting Into SQL On The Cheap
How To Convert Your Database To SQL
Converting TPS To MS-SQL
Avoid My SQL Mistakes!
SQL Data Types Comparison
The SQL Answer Cowboy
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