New (Unplanned) Features Coming To CHT

Last week, I made a deal to buy unrestricted source code for GCal and GCalc from Dave Hlavac who purchased the rights for these products from Gitano. While this was not in our plans specifically, the opportunity came up and we made an offer which Dave accepted.

In our January forward plans I did make the following statement which underlines the intent of this code-rights purchase and will continue throughout the year. So, if you have something of worth you'd like to sell or contribute to CHT, or if you know someone who might also be interested in doing this please feel free to discuss it with me via private email (gcreces@sympatico.ca) or skype me (CHTHandyMan).

FROM OUR JANUARY 2008 WHAT'S NEW PAGE
While we've always done most of the development work in CHT ourselves, we're keenly interested in expanding CHT by incorporating classes and templates you've created or feel may make a contribution to the tool kit or to Clarion developers in general. While offering your creation freelance (free of charge or value priced) to the Clarion community may seem like a generous or perhaps lucrative thing to do, our experience is that there's more of the "generous" than of the "lucrative" to be found in most Clarion 3rdparty undertakings.

We do not have rights to the GCAL and GCALC brand names, nor are we interested in having them or maintaining them. We won't even market our code-adaptations as separate products per-se. Dave will continue to market these products under those names himself or sell them forward, however he sees fit to do.

CHT, however, has purchased unrestricted rights to incorporate and adapt the source code for these two products into the CHT tool kit and you'll get them as part of CHT at no extra charge as long as you're a paid-up subscriber. That's how CHT's all-in subscription plan works. You get everything for one low, annual subscription price.

Since both ex-Gitano products are done in a procedural style, meant to be sold as DLL's, I've begun to adapt them into source-OOP format similar to that used in our other 130 or so OOP libraries. We will, of course, be adding our own template interface to these OOP libraries when they've been adapted.

In the past week, I spent 1 1/2 days adapting just one calculator for our own use and there are 9 or 10 of them in the set. I wondered at the time, whether it might not have been just as expedient to have built them from scratch. I'll reserve judgement on that as I work through the rest of the set.

Cheers...

Gus Creces
The Clarion Handy Tools Page
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New Sub-Build 12A1.03 Released Today

We've just released a new sub-build numbered 12A1.03. This is the third update to our first-quarter-of-2008 build (12A1). If you're a CHT subscriber you can start your WEBUPDATER from the folder called "The Clarion Handy Tools" and update your tool kit with the latest features.

I'm just in the process of updating our CHT forum members with all that's new in this build update. On completing that I'll post some highlights here and on our March 2008 What's New page.

While there are some cool new features in this build update, there are some very extensive additions coming to CHT in the next build, 12B1.00. That build, all things being equal, will hit the streets early in April 2008.

Cheers...
Gus M. Creces
The Clarion Handy Tools Page

The IDEs of March

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

Feb 29th, 2008 Last Day For Discount

It's Feb 29, 2008. Tonight at Midnight (EST) the price of our toolkit to new and expired subscribers goes back up to $499.00 CDN from its presently discounted price of $299.00 for the full product.


Cheers...
Gus M. Creces
The Clarion Handy Tools Forum

Only 2 Days Left In 40% Discount Deal

We're down to the wire on our new and expired subscriber discount. There's no better time to buy than right now. Just two days left before the discount ends.

On Feb 29, 2008 Midnight (EST) the price of our toolkit to new and expired subscribers goes back up to $499.00 CDN from its presently discounted price of $299.00 for the full product.

We're not ending our use of CDN (Canadian Dollars) for pricing. Our buck is pretty much on par with the US buck these days, give or take a cent, so there's no significant price difference due to currency.

Cheers...
Gus Creces
The Clarion Handy Tools Page

Compiling C6 Applications In C7

As we've been telling you, CHT works well in the context of C7.

Using the Cross-Export facility built into our Compile Manager I exported the following apps from C6 to C7 with no code changes. These C7 (precompiled) versions can be downloaded and installed from here if you'd like to take a look.

CHT Handy Zip'n Email: HNDZIPNEMAIL.APP
CHT Handy Zip'n FTP: HNDZIPNFTP.APP
CHT Handy Zip'n HTTP Post: HNDHTTPZIPNPOST.APP
CHT Video Education Player: HNDVIDEOEDUCATION

Our next challenge: to build the same apps with Clarion #. ;-)

A C7 Appraisal (Win32 Version)

• In my view C7 menus, while an improvement from ordinary C6 menus, are a step down from the menus that CHT has been able to give you in C6, for the last 4 or 5 years.

• The window editor in C7 works, kind of, but in my view it sucks in many ways compared to the one in C6. Fine movements and accurate placement is not as good. You also cant size a window upward, which means if you need to make room at the top of a window, you need to move all the controls down. In C6 you can size the window upward making room at the top without moving any controls. This is progress?

• The C7 compiler and editor work well, and code completion is now pretty solid.

• Text box controls in C7 are not as controllable as they are in C6. Hiding the line around a flat, transparent text control in C7 is not possible unless you set its RTF property to true.

• Font rendering is considerably better in C7 than in C6.

All in all, definitely C7 (Win32) is presently not worth the long wait, so the final product had better be good.

Tell me what you think. Are these C7 versions of the Utilities all that much "prettier" or more functional in C7 than in C6?

Cheers...

Gus Creces
The Clarion Handy Tools Page
Visit Website

VISTA Installation Double Check

I had the occasion to do a fresh VISTA installation of Clarion and CHT the other night. That gave me an opprortunity to double check that our CHT installation works 100% out of the box on a freshly configured VISTA machine.

After installing Clarion 6.3.9058 and registering only the ABCHAIN.TPL and the RTARPDF.TPL (both SV templates) and confirming that Clarion 6.3 was working correctly by compiling a few SV demo apps, I downloaded a copy of WEBUPDATER and set it with AutoContinue Checked (so I wouldn't have to click through all 6 steps manually).

That installed the CHT toolkit on the new machine. I followed this up by starting HNDCMP.EXE (the CHT Compile Manager) and told it to compile ALL 120 CHT applications listed there. The whole set compiled and ran as expected without error or intervention from me.

I normally do one of these full installs and full compiles before releasing a new version. But not always on a pristine, new machine. So there's always a margin of error if I forget something, since a file I've forgotten may already be there from a previous install, so only a new user would notice it missing.

This brand new machine plus brand new Clarion installation is a nice double-check opportunity that only comes when the VISTA HOME variant that ships with HP machines irritates me enough to completely format its hard drive, and install a standard copy of VISTA BUSINESS.

Don't know if any of you have ever purchased a machine from HP, but most of them are filled with HP crapplets that serve no purpose that I can fathom.

Cheers...
Gus Creces
The Clarion Handy Tools Page