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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. If you haven't registered, this month is your last chance get a discount on registration fee. 

CIDC 2017 is on! Register by March 31 and save $300 on the conference registration, or $550 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 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. But it comes at a price; at the number of subscribers ClarionMag has, a license isn't cheap. It's not an unreasonable cost, especially considering what I've paid over the years in my own development time creating the previous versions of Clarion Magazine. Only it become clear to me in recent years that Clarion Magazine was transitioning from a business to a hobby. 

I've thought a lot about why this has happened, and what inside and outside forces have been at play. But perhaps the best explanation is this: it's been a good long run of 18 years, and it's just time. 

Only I don't want to let Clarion Magazine go, really. 

The best option I could come up with was to move it to a low cost hosted site, where all the software updates are included and I don't have to worry about any maintenance issues at all, not even server certificates. 

There is, however, a different price to pay. This site is limited to no more than ten active users. That means that I've had to deactivate almost all subscriber accounts.

The bad news is you can no longer log in, leave comments, save favorites etc.

The good news is you no longer have to log in or pay any kind of subscription fee. 

I do expect to post articles from time to time. I still have the urge to write, and I still use Clarion in the majority of my consulting work. But you'll probably see even less about traditional Clarion coding and more about where and how Clarion fits in the larger world of software development. What matters the most to me about Clarion these days isn't its past glories, or the nuances of the language, but how Clarion coding can be done using today's best practices, and perhaps most importantly how we can all preserve the value of our work for the future. 

So thank you everyone for all your support over the years, not least in the form of subscriptions. It's been and still is a wonderful learning experience, for which I am always grateful. I hope you'll all continue to enjoy this latest incarnation of Clarion Magazine. 

Dave Harms, Publisher

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, wrote articles for Clarion publications, and was the author of the book Programming Objects in Clarion. His interests included flying, scuba, prog rock and on rare occasions politics. 

I always enjoyed meeting Russ at DevCons, but that hadn't happened for a while. This year I was disheartened to hear that he was battling cancer. As his health deteriorated he had to stop working; a GoFundMe campaign started by Rick Smith raised over $23,000 to defray some of Russ's expenses. Russ's sister Julie was with him in his last days, and expressed gratitude to the Clarion community for their support. 

Russ Eggen passed away December 24, 2016 at age 57. 

In 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, the stage of development, and the scope of the requirement. In Part 2 Dave demonstrates his favorite way to design small- to medium-sized chunks of business logic. 

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? What if you have more than one feature toggle (and you know you will): could there be groups of features you want to turn on and off? What if your feature is part of a web application? Will it apply system-wide or only to certain URLs? And how do you go about designing something like this? Here's a clue: as with much if not most development, if your first impulse is to open the data dictionary you're doing it wrong. 

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. 

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!

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.
• Contribute $100 or more and get: 
  • A year's worth of ClarionMag for free
  • Rick Martin's Format Assignment Alignment Addin
• Contribute $500 or more and get ClarionMag free for life! 
• Contribute $299 or more and Mark Riffery will provide "The Interview" service to your or the business owner of your choice. This is a set of 40-50 tough questions about your business. You answer the questions, Mark answers. You'll gain critical insights and advice about growing your business, specific to your business and your situation. 
• Contribute $250 or more get 16 hours of free consulting from Mike Gorman, via phone or GoToMeeting and you'll also get a five production user version of the Metabase System with one year of updates. 

Update: The campaign has exceeded its target with $13,719 raised as of June 25!

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. 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 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 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. But shortly thereafter Microsoft announced its ASP.NET MVC framework, and I eventually switched to that with the idea that it would be a bit more mainstream and better supported. That was the right decision - Castle Monorail has languished, and ASP.NET MVC (which is now part of ASP.NET vNext) is bigger and better than ever. 

It wasn't a completely clean break in favor of Microsoft tooling, however. I needed a reliable data layer, and back then Entity Framework was still pretty green. I had previous experience with Hibernate and Java, so I picked up the .NET version (NHibernate) and another toolkit called Sharp Architecture which provided a framework for using NHibernate with ASP.NET MVC. 

Like Monorail, Sharp Architecture hasn't gotten much love recently. When the archive site first went down I tried to update its Visual Studio solution with current versions of the many different libraries it uses, but I ran into a brick wall of dependency errors especially around Sharp Architecture. NuGet is a wonderful tool, but it can't work miracles.

So I decided to rip out Sharp Architecture and some of its related tooling and upgrade everything to MVC 5. Although Entity Framework has pulled ahead of NHibernate in recent years, I chose to leave the EF migration for another time. NHibernate is still well supported and a new data layer would mean an unnecessary delay getting the site back online.

I'm through most of the technical hurdles now. I have a working data layer again, with a slightly different implementation of the repository pattern. The old site used Castle Windsor for dependency injection (DI); I yanked that in favor of Autofac. Actually at first I tried to do without DI at all; why, I asked myself, introduce unnecessary complication? But while creating a proof of concept solution that simply read data from the database and dumped it out to a web page, I had problems maintaining an open database session for the lifetime of the page request. That's just the sort of thing that DI containers do quite well, and Autofac does especially well. But that's another, longer story. 

There's a major change on the UI side as well. The original archive site uses ASP.NET syntax with a number of HTML helpers, but back in MVC 3 Microsoft introduced the very cool Razor syntax for web pages. So as I bring individual pages back online I'm also rewriting them using Razor. 

As you may recall the archive site used a radius-cornered layout, and it did so via a number of formatting tricks as radiused corners were not widely available in CSS at the time. In the event I have to fiddle much (or at all) with the new site to get the appearance right I may also switch over to a mobile-friendly Foundation-based layout (besides which, radiused corners just aren't that cool anymore). I've been using Foundation in a consulting project and I've been quite impressed with it and with the SCSS-based approach to style sheets. That too is a subject for another time. 

Meanwhile I'm working away at the rewrite. I'm not prepared to give an ETA yet but I'm pleased with the progress. 

I very much appreciate everyone's patience. It's been a challenging and stressful time in the magazine's history, and I hope it won't take too much longer to get the archive site back online. Meanwhile if you already have full rights to the archive I can set you up so you can search the PDFs on this site. Just drop me a note on this page or send me an email. 

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 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. For a more detailed explanation of code extraction and automated testing see Many-to-many checkboxes revisited.

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. 

WinDev-US,  Cowboy Computing Systems, Next Age Consulting, Fabrice Harari, and SoftDesign  Consulting/WxTraining.net are organizing a training conference to be held in Gatlinburg, Tennessee at the Edgewater Hotel and Convention Center August 28-31, 2013 with an optional two-day Fundamentals Bootcamp beginning on August 26 

DevRoadmaps publisher Dave Harms explains the reason for the current publishing hiatus.

The 2012 WxDevCon is now under way in Nashville, TN. Andy Stapleton has posted some pics.

I thought I'd be back on track with the closing instalments of WinDev in an Hour a Day but Hurricane Sandy has caused headaches, not for DevRoadmaps but for a consulting client. I hope to resume WDIAHAD next week. 

Dave Harms takes a look at WinDev's ability to create components for multiple platforms, and comes across a few configuration options that hint at build automation and customized code generation.

Dave Harms explores component creation and discovers a tools collection he didn't know existed.

There's something fitting about covering time management and business rules in the same post... 

WinDev's integrated source code management makes it easier for teams to collaborate on projects. And not just teams - if you're a lone developer you have a lot to gain by using SCM.

The project dashboard provides a lot of different ways to track the health of your project; you can change how WinDev evaluates the patient's vital signs. And then there's SCM, which also plays into project status tracking.

There's lots of useful stuff in the project dashboard, not least of which is the option to enable source code management. 

Dave Harms solves his object-passing problem with help from Peter Holemans and offers up a short argument for why passing "self" to another object should be a rare occurrence. He also touches on constants, reference assignments, interfaces and multiple inheritance. 

Our WinDev In An Hour A Day series is taking a break so we can get caught up on other content and hopefully get the site software updated (there are lots of cool new features in the update, so stay tuned!)

WinDev lets you return whatever you like from a procedure or method; you don't have to declare the return type ahead of time. In fact you can return varying data types from the same method.

Dave Harms makes some headway testing method overloading (and discovers an unexpected bonus) but gets stalled by two tests that, for no apparent reason, won't run. 

What do you do when a unit test can't give you all the information you need? You write to the system log and view the results with DbgView. Dave Harms muddles his way through to calling the Windows API in WinDev. 

Dave's tour of WinDev's OO capabilities brings up some questions about method parameters, which leads to setting up some unit tests...

Yes, WinDev has OO capabilities. Here's why you should care (if you don't already), plus a first look at how to declare a class.

Dave Harms dabbles in chart creation, messes up his environment, and wonders why menus aren't searchable.

Sending a file or an email between two computers doesn't sound all that complicated, but there's a lot to consider especially if you want the UI to remain responsive while the transfer is happening. WinDev has a number of example apps demonstrating how to do FTP and email. 

The tutorial may be a little thin on the subject of socket communication, but there's a nice little client/server chat application that's worth a closer look.

Today Johan van Zyl relayed a Node.js offer email in comp.lang.clarion. This is a promotional offer which is designed to get you signed up on a $29/month plan at Learnable.com. The first month is just $9 and you get the Node.js course and ebook. I haven't had any experience with Learnable yet, and it's probably well worth the $$$, but do note that you can cancel any time if you just want to drop the $9.

I've gone ahead and signed up for the $9 offer. I've done some work with Node.js but I'd definitely like to learn more. If you haven't played with it yet, I suggest you take a look. From the Nodejs.org web site:

Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

There are lots of cool things you can do with Node.js - I've mainly experimented with it in conjunction with DocPad to create lightweight web sites. 

Here's the offer text:

Are you doomed if you're not already developing for the web and/or mobile devices? Possibly. Here are a few things to keep in mind. 

Lee White points out a recent blog post savaging MySQL for various flaws. The comments are also interesting reading. 

Mark Riffey recently mentioned Telerik's Icenium, a cloud-based development tool for both iOS and Android development that leverages JavaScript and HTML5. There's a desktop IDE for Windows developers and a browser-based UI for other platforms. Your code lives in the cloud (Rackspace, reportedly). Apps are distributed through their respective app stores. 

Icenium uses Telerik's Kendo UI, which lets you use one code base and create native user interfaces on multiple platforms. There's also something called LiveSync, which makes it possible to have multiple different test devices running and all syncing in real time to changes made via the development environment. 

Check out this review.

Lee White points out this blog post on creating your own network attached storage (NAS) box. Steve Streza (technology, design, and bacon lover) explains how he went about creating an 11 terabyte storage server based on the FreeNAS operating system (a variant of FreeBSD). The blog post contains detailed instructions and a parts list with a total cost of materials of just under $1500. The system uses six drives and can tolerate failure on up to two drives at a time. 

While running VS 2012 today I finally hit the wall on that ridiculous all capitals main menu, which surely has to rank with Microsoft Bob as one of Redmond's worst UI moments. 

Happily, I found this post by Richard Banks on how to restore sanity (i.e. mixed case) to the main menu. 

In case that post goes offline, all you need to do is add this DWord registry entry (line break added):

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\
VisualStudio\11.0\General\SuppressUppercaseConversion

with a value of 1 and then restart VS 2012. 

Ah, sanity!

Dennis Evans points out this free book from RedGate on backing up and restoring SQL Server databases. Yes, this 391 page PDF includes information on RedGate's own SQL Backup Pro (plus there's a free trial version of that product) but there's also a lot of generally useful information on backing and and restoring databases. 

Microsoft has announced BUILD 2012, its annual developer conference which this year will be held at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington from Oct 20 to Nov 2. Registration opens August 8. You can view the 2011 presentations at Channel 9.

Unfortunately the chosen date is a direct conflict with DevConnections in Las Vegas. 

Mark Riffey brought Mighty Moose to my attention, which led me to a few other products that similarly compile your .NET code while you type, and run any affected unit tests so you get immediate feedback on how your changes affect your code base. This is pretty cool stuff. 

I've put up a couple of quick pages on Microsoft's Reactive Extensions (Rx) and Paul Betts' ReactiveUI, two libraries that are generating a lot of interest in the .NET world. 

Michael Dettmer has posted some information on the CodeCharge web development tool, which he points out has a lot of features that make it similar to Clarion and WinDev. Generated code can be in ASP.NET (C#), ASP, PHP, Java Servlets, JSP, ColdFusion or Perl.

While looking at ways to manage database changes that happen as a result of application upgrades, Dave Harms comes across SQL Server's snapshot capabilities. There are some issues to be aware of, but if you need to roll back a database change, snapshots can help you do it in a hurry. 

Our focus at DevRoadmaps is on two RAD tools, Clarion and WinDev. But there are lots of RAD tools out there, and we're always happy to learn more. After a question from a reader about CodeCharge, we've gone ahead and created a new page listing the available RAD tools. There are just a few entries - help us add more!

Visual Studio 11 Beta can be downloaded at no charge. Major changes in Visual Studio 11 include: 

• Support for Windows 8 Metro-style apps
• Language changes for Visual Basic, C#, C++ and F#
• Backward project compatibility without conversion
• Viewing code structure
• File preview
• Better multi-monitor support
• Tool window filtering (should be handy for massive projects)
• C++ code editor improvements
• Javascript code editor improvements
• Easier async programming in VB and C#
• Code analysis window
• New table designer
• ASP.NET enhancements
• Sharepoint development enhancements
• Better graphics tools for game dev
• C++ massive parallelism
• .NET Framework 4.5 beta

For more see the what's new page.

Back in January there was a newsgroup discussion about whether WHERE IN or WHERE EXISTS is a better choice when using a subquery. And that brings up a few other questions, like the role of the cache in testing and the danger of using NOT in WHERE clauses. 

Developers who use RAD tools like Clarion and WinDev do so because they believe those tools offer a very real advantage over traditional hand-coder development tools. But are those advantages as great as they seem? David Harms looks at when and why RAD is a help and a hindrance. 

We've set up a page for third party SQL database admin tools. Products currently listed include Navicat, SQLMaestro, EMS SQL Management Studio and SQL Delta. We're looking for more recommendations!

DevRoadmaps contains a growing number of pages for MS SQL users. These include: a links page; notes on SQL Server 2012, SQL Server admin tools, how to /wiki/spaces/other/pages/429783, and the tuning advisor, 

Check out these jQuery book recommendations.

A couple of links to Monty Widenius arguing for MariaDB over MySQL and explaining when and where you need to license either of these SQL servers.