Clarion 9 build 10241 discussion

Clarion 9 build 10241 is the first release of C9 to CSP program participants.

There was no change list included with the release email.

Speed improvements

Some devs are reporting significant speed improvements within the IDE,

Registry issues using C8 within C9

If you use C9 to host your C8 development (rather than installing each version separately, which is the default) then C9 will make your C8 registry unreadable from the C8 IDE, as the registry format has changed.

Problem generating/building DLLs

The IDE throws a generation error when creating code for DLLs. The app will build but as no EXP file is generated you can't use the DLL (at least not by linking in the DLL's lib). Diego says this will be fixed in the next build.

Update: Interim fix!

Bob Z has provided an interim fix for the DLL problem, which is caused by an incorrectly formatted Type32 node inside ClarionProperties.xml file.

This XML file is located in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\SoftVelocity\Clarion\9.0 (where <username> is replaced with your own user name).

Here's how an incorrectly formatted file appears:

The Type32 node should not exist. Instead it should be replaced by the following Properties node:

 	<Properties name="Type32">
	    <signed value="long" />
	    <unsigned value="long" />
	    <handle value="long" />
	    <bool value="long" />
	</Properties>

This will be fixed for the next release, but meanwhile you can edit the file manually.

An extremely weird thing happened while I was editing my ClarionProperties.xml in Notepad++. I had copied the above text into the clipboard to paste into this document, and then to paste into the XML file. But I figured I should probably close Clarion first just in case it wrote to the file on exit. I closed Clarion. Notepad++ said the file had changed. Aha! I was right. I reloaded the file.

And to my great surprise it was now the correctly formatted file! How did that happen? Did what I had in the clipboard somehow make it into the file? That really doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Or did the IDE somehow wake up and realize it needed to rewrite the XML file?

Puzzling.

Start page styling

There's been some grumbling about a change to the IDE that internalized start page styling so it can no longer be customized via layout.css.

Can you ship product with this release?

At least one dev is shipping C9-built apps to customers with no reported issues.

SQLite driver

Not sure I completely understood the discussion, but it appears blob contents are not being copied as expected.

Report generator interface changes

There have been some changes to the report generator interface so if you have older source or an older version of a third party product that uses this interface you'll need to get the update or modify the source.

Possible duplicate symbols

Diego: "Most of the symbols from Win32ext.lib were merged with the Win32.lib in C9."

%Parameters is read only

In C9 there is only one prompt for prototypes (as there should be). Older templates that attempt to set the %Parameters value will trigger an error. In the old days Clarion code had labels in parameters and data types in prototypes. For years now it's been best practice to have parameters and prototypes declared exactly the same (except that for procedure/method implementations you have to leave off the return type if any, which seems pretty silly to me).

/ConfigDir

Graham Dawson has reported problems with Clarion not registering drivers when the /ConfigDir IDE switch is used.