Happy New Year everybody and thank you for reading our blog and using our products!
Looking back
2013 was a good year and it was a bad year. The bad point was the car accident in February and long recovery process for me. It took much longer for me to heal from that than I expected. I'm still going to a chiropractor twice a month and I'm getting better and better all the time, but there have been a couple of backslides when I wasn't careful.
The good points were that we bought a new house and moved into it in August. It's a pretty awesome house - we think:) (you can see more photos on that page)
Sue managed her last ISVCon conference in September, and she is also attending college, going for a bachelors degree in business management as the final goal. Laila is busy with school and playing the bass, which she is really good with and learns quickly. Her private teacher wants her to start playing with him in the Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra her ninth grade year. We are very proud parents:)
Looking forward
Unfortunately all this came down pretty hard on my product work last year and I didn't get a lot of releases out there, although I pushed to make sure that Clarion 9 compatible versions of our products were released in timely manner (I hope). Doesn't mean I sat idle handed, though;) The last two months I have done quite a bit of work on Build Automator to work out the bug fixes that I had made and lost earlier to an unfortunate mix-up caused by System Restore see my last blog post. I have some testing on the install left and final testing with Clarion 9 and it will be ready to release.
My plan for this year is to tackle client work in the first half of the month and product work in the second half. Before, I have been trying to get product work done here and there when I had time, but I've come to the conclusion (finally!) that it just doesn't work for me. I have a difficult time jumping from one project to the other. It works much better for me to be able to concentrate on one project for a longer period of time (spanning several days) rather than try to squeeze in an hour here and there.
Support for Clarion 6 and older
If everything works well for me using Clarion 9, I will switch over to it as the main Clarion development IDE. I will update products with regards to the old IDEs, but during 2014 I will most likely stop product work for the old IDE. It's not going to happen all at once, but rather one product at a time. That doesn't mean that the product will stop working in Clarion 6! Not at all, just that I will not test them as thoroughly in Clarion 6 as I have done and it's possible that some build introduces features that are only in Clarion 8/9.
Builds where I know that I'm using new features that don't exist in the old IDE will have the support for Clarion 6 and earlier removed from the installer. So instead of seeing a list of Clarion versions going all the way back to Clarion 4 for some of the products, it will only go back to Clarion 7 or 8. I don't plan on testing much with Clarion 8 either!
Why is supporting both IDEs not such a good idea?
This will simplify things for me. For example: Currently I have to maintain two DLLs that I use in the templates. One for the old IDE using an old version of Borland C++ and one for the new IDE using Visual C++. Borland C++ does not work with the new IDE and the Visual C++ one does not work with the old! The template language in the new IDE uses PASCAL attribute to indicate that the call uses stdcall parameter passing.
In the old templates I used WIN32 attribute to indicate that the DLL was 32 bit, not 16 bit. WIN32 is not valid in the new IDE and it will not register templates with it. PASCAL is not valid in the old IDE and will cause it to crash when registering the template! This means that at install time I have to replace WIN32 with PASCAL in template files that use #RUNDLL. I also have to search/replace WIN32 with PASCAL or the other way around every time I test a template in C6 or C9! So the sooner I can have all of this on one page, the happier I will be!
All of this makes it very easy for a bug to crawl in. Fortunately Build Automator takes care of a lot of this for me, and there is no way I could support the products and installs that I have without it!
With that I'm going back to work:) Again I wish you all Happy New Year and hope all of us will be prosperous in this new year:)
Arnor Baldvinsson
