Forgive the bad pun. I'm not talking about March 15, the day Julius Caesar was murdered by his friend Brutus. This is about the new Clarion 7 and Clarion .NET IDE's that we currently have available to us from Softvelocity as of March 2008.
Clarion 7 and Clarion .NET really are the same IDE, exhibiting different modes in the context of different code file extensions. Clarion 7 incorporates the capabilities of the Clarion language as it was (as it is) in Clarion 6.3 with a few refinements having to do with the visual interface of your application, fonts and entry controls for one. Clarion .NET, incorporates the capabilities of a whole new .NET Clarion language, which is being called Clarion# (Clarion Sharp).
The IDE in use here, comes pretty much full-blown from SharpDevelop, an open source C# IDE for Microsoft .NET.
At time of writing, these two Clarion IDE's, which are really one but which you pay for twice, depending on which compiler you want to use - the traditional Win32 Clarion language or the new Clarion# language - are versioned "7.0.0 Build 2957". I really should call it what it is. It's a single IDE not two IDE's, since they (it) really are (is) one and the same thing, but that would have made my title less clever: "The IDE of March???".
This Clarion 7 IDE is pretty good. It should be, given the 8-year evolution that the SharpDevelop IDE has already gone through. That's not to say Softvelocity hasn't added a lot of value in its "Clarionization" effort. The dictionary editor is working now, that's a necessary pre-cursor to data application generation. There's also a nice graphic feature I'll probably never use called the "Data Diagrammer", they might have pushed that one off to the side and spent the resouces it took to build that, on the yet-to-appear code generation component.
Despite the Clarionization effort, the Clarion IDE still isn't Clarion until there's a working application generator system, at least as good as the one presently in Clarion 6.3. As my personal profile on this blog suggests, I've used Clarion extensively over the years for its advanced code generation capabilities. Unless that's there, I might as well be using C# or Visual Basic because OOP languages have all started to resemble one another. Say what you will about the plethora of wizards, doodads, controls and drop-in-whatnot in Visual Studio, VS can't do code generation like Clarion's of the past.
Let's hope that soon, before the IDEs of March again become the IDEs of November, we'll see an application-generation system for the new IDE. IDEs of April? IDEs of May?
Cheers...
Gus M. Creces
The Clarion Handy Tools Forum
The CHT Blogger
Thanks for your interest in The Clarion Handy Tools, an awesome collection of productivity enhancements for Clarion developers. These tools consist of an ever-expanding set of Clarion Templates and OOP Classes that extend or complement the normal functionality of the Clarion Application Development System from SoftVelocity.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
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