Category: Clarion 11

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It's taken a while, but all our product installs are now compatible with Clarion 11 and available for download!

This process took quite a bit longer than I expected, mostly because this required considerable amount of work for most of the templates to make them look better in Clarion 11.  But I think it was definitely worth it!  While I did not do a lot of design work, what needed to be done was duplicating a lot of code to make it work with both Clarion 10 and older as well as with Clarion 11.

I also took the opportunity to add more standardization to the Setup Builder install scrips as well as my Build Automator scripts to make builds easier in the future.  Same applies to the templates, where for example template headers look exactly the same in all our templates now, and the support tab is now 100% identical everywhere to make it easy to access.

Another task was to change all the templates from using .hlp help files to use .chm help files.  .hlp files are not really supported any more on Windows 10 and the IDE has supported .chm for a few versions now so there is no reason not to use it.  So I decided to pull the plug and change all the templates that had help file access to use .chm files.  This required a minor change also to every HLP link in the templates.

For the first time I did not do any testing with the old IDE, i.e. Clarion 6, apart from making sure the templates registered, since I still have a few Clarion 6 apps that I need to maintain for a while longer, so I still need them to work in the old IDE 😉  But by the end of the year, I will ONLY support the new IDE and generally just the last 3 versions.  So 9.1, 10 and 11 by the end of the year.  Keeping everything backward compatible has limited me in certain visual design aspects.  Clarion 6 is 15 years old  (2003) and Clarion 6.3 is 9 years old (2009) and it's time to let it rest 🙂

Since there have been quite a few changes in both the templates and in the build process, I would really appreciate if you would let me know as soon as possible if you have any problems with the installers - or the templates!

Enjoy 🙂

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Clarion 11 testing is going well! But I'm still not done with updating to Clarion 11 compatibility - close but not quite there.

On a very positive note, I have not found any issues at all in Clarion 11! I'm running C10 and C11 side by side and both have worked without a glitch! Softvelocity is releasing Release Candidate (RC) 2 today and announced that Clarion 11 Gold is close, see their latest blog post here: http://clarionsharp.com/blog/clarion-11-rc-2-released/

I apologize how long it's taken me to get these builds out!

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Clarion 11 builds are getting closer and I hope to have them all sorted this weekend and push them out next week, starting Monday, October 1st.

One of the changes in Clarion 11 is in the template interface. After many years it has finally happened - the template window has been widened! That presented a bit of a problem with the presentation as now we have two distinct visual designs - one for Clarion 11 and later and one for Clarion 10 and older. The old format we have grown accustomed to over the past 25 years without much change still looks like it always has.

Clarion10Template

The new template window is considerably wider and fits much better with today's large and high resolution monitors.

Clarion11Template

Some of our template windows will be updated to take advantage of the added real estate, but I'm not sure if that will all be included in the initial builds for Clarion 11.

One change that will be across all our products - the version number will change to be year.month.build.  That will help immediately identify the release time of the template to help with support.  As always the version numbers and support information will keep being included on every template window.

Another change that is coming is that by the end of this year we will no longer test or support backward compatibility with the old 16bit Clarion IDE.  I have to maintain several 32bit Windows virtual machines, which gets to be quite expensive and the 3GB memory limitation in 32bit operating systems doesn't leave much room for the new IDE along with other development tools.  So after January 1st, 2019 we hope to have all demo apps etc. upgraded to Clarion 9 or 10 only and the last builds of 2018 will be the last builds that support Clarion 6 and older.  We may leave the installers to support the older IDE for now, but we will no longer support the old IDE.  Clarion 6.3.9059 was released in early 2009 and I think 10 years is a pretty good run for a development environment.  Time to move on 🙂