Category: News

To all of you out there, Happy Thanksgiving from Sue, Laila and I:)

It's been a long time since I blogged! It took much longer for us to settle in than we had expected. Partially because Sue was managing the ISV conference, which was held in Reno in the end of September. She was gone for over a week to get that done. While she was gone, her college classes started so when she came home it took her over a month, just to get caught up and she ended up dropping one class of four that she had planned to take. After a lot of contemplating she decided to stretch her study out for one more year, giving her time to get caught up next year. She is only taking one class next quarter.

All this didn't give me much time other than to work on the client projects I have, which are all very long term. That said, I have managed to kick out a few new builds with some minor updates.

Build Automator
I have made good progress on Build Automator. A new build, the first in over two years, will be out in the second week of December. Most of the work has been in the IDE. There were areas of instability which I had put considerably work into fixing back in 2011. In January 2012 I ran into problems with my development machine and ended up having to use System Restore to get it back up and running. Unfortunately I did not realize the effects it had on my Clarion projects:( I lost over two months worth of work in Build Automator, which set me completely off course.

The new version has full support for the new Clarion IDE (Clarion 7 - 9) via the MS-Build action. The older IDE (Clarion 6 and older) action has been made a bit more robust, but I will probably not put much more work into it unless bugs are discovered.

Problems with duplicate, variables, copy/paste were all related to the same problem which has been fixed. Support for Setup Builder 8, which was added with an updated DLL in February 2013 is now of course included. A problem with Software Passport Version 9 has also been resolved. The new update will be available both as a download and also as a web-update.

Icetips Utilities
I will have a new build ready sometime in December, probably close to the end, with documentation updates and a few updates and fixes. The next build of the Utilities after this will introduce some changes. It will include a run-time library with additional functions that are written in C++ and .NET. The library DLLs will need to be distributed with your binary code, but only if you use any of the methods that call the run-time library. The DLLs will only be dynamically loaded, so there are no lib files to worry about. The Icetips run-time library (ITRTL) will be included with a new product that I have had in the pipeline for a while and never got around to fix it. I'm hoping I can kick it out in December, but January for sure!

I have a collection of SQL and related classes that I have graciously been allowed to add to the Utilities by my client who I developed those classes and methods for. This includes for example methods to build WHERE filters, build ORDER BY clause based on a key, use aggregate functions, use double quote (") instead of single quote in queries, prevent SQL injection, log SQL to file or DebugView, build queries based on entry field data (i.e. create query form) and more.

For now, I'm concentrating on getting Build Automator ready and out the door:)

Happy Thanksgiving

Arnor Baldvinsson

Last week brought some challenges - as always.

I have been working mostly on customer support for the past week. Had some backlog that I had to deal with and got some additions to it. Fortunately some of them sorted themselves out by updating software and the customer realizing that there were issues with his server. But the rest is high priority stuff so I have had to hold off work on the new releases for the most part.

Customer support comes in waves. There can be a month without a single email, then I get 10 in one day and they just keep coming and then they are gone again. It's hardly ever related to new releases (mine or others) they just pop up out of the blue. Often the issues sort themselves out as the customer realizes something is missing or a mistake was made, which is always good. Then there are those pesky problems, that make no sense and take up a lot of time to dig into and try to find a solution - I have 3 of those right now. It would probably be worthy of some research, but nobody's paying me for it, so I will not be the one doing it;)

This coming week I will keep working on getting the Clarion 9 compatible installs out and hopefully I will make a big dent into it before the end of this week:)

-- Arnor Baldvinsson

This year has been a bit challenging for me so far.

In early January I went through an allergy test that showed that I was dairy intolerant. I spent a good chunk of January on liquid diet, which was challenging to say the least, but ultimately good for me:)

In the second weekend in February we spent a day in Seattle and on the way home we were rear-ended. To make things even worse, the person that hit us left the scene in a big hurry! It wasn't a big impact, but enough to rattle my already bad back and caused a problem in my right shoulder - yep, my mouse arm;)

With the help of a good chiropractor my back is getting better every day, but unfortunately my shoulder is not. I'm scheduled for a MRI of the shoulder tomorrow and hopefully it will show what is going on. This has really affected my productivity and the darn shoulder gets really sore and stiff when working on the computer.

Despite this I have made progress on product releases, just not as much as I had planned so I'm a bit behind schedule. I have spent some time on cleaning up several products and worked on demos and documentation. I have also added some articles to the Tips and Tricks section on our Zendesk forum

I'm not going to promise anything about releases, but if nothing else happens (knock on wood:) releases will start to pop out in the next couple of weeks.

Arnor Baldvinsson