CIDC 2015 day one summary

I'll have more detailed notes on CIDC next week, but for now here's a taste of Day One. You can review the official CIDC schedule here.

During the Monday/Tuesday training sessions two rooms were in use; for the conference sessions the dividing wall was taken out and attendees sat in front of two screens.

Bob Z kicked off the conference with his keynote address, in which he talked about Clarion 9 and 10's support for touch devices.

Bob then introduced ClarionUIX, a new template with accompanying images that brings a new look and feel to Clarion apps. This product will be available on GitHub and the hope is that Clarion devs will contribute their own themes and/or changes to the supplied themes. 

You can find the repository at https://github.com/clarionuix. However only the images are there at present - the template needs some fixing up, according to Diego. 

Diego then presented his top ten list of Clarion 10 features (which are actually also Clarion 9 features). 

Rick Martin was scheduled to go up next, but Diego's session ran overtime so unfortunately Rick got bumped. But he had several other sessions coming up so we would get a chance to see him again. 

After the break Bruce Johnson gave a talk on how to approach app design for touch-enabled devices. And then Marcin Kawalerowicz and Andrzej Skolniak presented the work they've done on integrating C# .NET code with Clarion. Although there is a .NET bridge available via Clarion.NET the work that Marcin and Andrzej have done is clearly massively important and useful. I'll have a more detailed report later. 

During the lunch break Marko Golen presented the latest version of the Thin@ thin client, used by a number of Clarion developers. 

After lunch Dries Driessen (who has now moved to the United States) gave another rapid-fire and highly informative talk on using the SoftVelocity web classes, for which he has provided easier-to-use wrapper classes. 

Next Gordon Holfelder explained the classes he's developed to do direct SQL access via the ODBC API, bypassing the Clarion file driver entirely. This isn't a replacement for the file driver system but does bring some important benefits for specific kinds of work. 

John Hickey wrapped up the day with his first official presentation, going through the various utilities that are included in the ClarionLive Ultimate Utilities package. He also introduced a new utility for building Message() statements using a visual interface. Very nice. 

There was one more third party presentation after the main sessions: Bruce Johnson gave his always impressive tour of how to improve your applications with CapeSoft utilities. 

And we all got our WinBooks - thank you Stamos!!! This did however result in some contention for limited wifi connections as everyone fired up their new devices and started going through the setup process.