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.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

For "Newbies" Getting Into CHT

To get "into" CHT, a good place to start is with the videos and the demo apps. There are about 130 demo apps which are briefly described by topic in this document: http://www.cwhandy.com/chtapplications.html

A good video to watch in order to get an overview of the CHT toolkit was recorded with Clarion Live! this past November, 2009. This video is linked from our home page under the menu item "Free Videos". The video menu item is entitled: CHT On Clarion Live! - > Clarion Live! Seminar #31 - Nov 2009.

There are also 35 other videos available from the "Free Videos" link on our home page. We suggest you leave these other videos until you begin studying the demo apps to which they're related.

We suggest you start by watching the Clarion Live! 3-hour video before anything else, and follow that up by studying the demo applications. Use our demo applications document to find demo apps that match the topics you're most interested in following up on first. The apps list is broken into categories of functionality.

Next, become familiar with the global AACHTControlPanel Template populated into all of these CHT demos to get the demo app to list for you all the templates it's using. Each template listed will then further link you into our template description document. How to do this is illustrated in the Clarion Live! video. From here, you can also get the application to tell you all Classes it is using and that generated document further links into an HTML representation of our class headers.

AACHTControlPanel, and all CHT templates for that matter, have a "Subscriber Support" dialog that links directly - and automatically - into our support forum where you can ask a question when you feel you need to. Here, I or one of our long-term users, will be happy to help you by answering questions. The forum has a print-to-PDF function with which you can print out a particular posting or a whole thread of postings if you need a hard copy for future reference. The CHT forum has been running since April 1st 2004 (in fact today, April 1, 2010, is its 6th anniversary) using CHT web technology and our data base contains over 50,000 entries threaded by subject - or by question asked as the case may be.

Shipped with CHT are the last 3 years of What's New Documents in PDF format. These are in located in \clarion6\3rdparty\hnd\pdf\ or \clarion7\accessory\hnd\pdf\. They're also linked from START Button -> All Programs -> "The Clarion Handy Tools" or "The Clarion Handy Tools C7" as the case may be.

Demo applications are located in \clarion6\hndapps\ (C6) and in a directory designated by you at install time in Clarion 7.

Starting in late May or early June, after our series of five Clarion.NET on-line seminars we will begin providing CHT subscribers with a Clarion.NET installer and an early version of CHT for Clarion.NET and some demo apps.

Cheers...
Gus Creces
The Clarion Handy Tools Page
www.cwhandy.com
usersupport@cwhandy.com
April 1, 2010

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