I had planned to write up blog entries as I was attending the conference, but that didn't quite work out! When I came home I had some work to attend to so I'm a bit late with this blog!
I only attended the conference, not the workshops. I had a table in the Solutions room, which was also where meals were served. The third party tables were lined up around the walls in the Solutions room and a lot of people came by my table to say hi and ask about our products. I really appreciate all the questions and feedback that I got and hope I was able to answer the questions:)
The first day, Monday, started out with Robert Zaunere's keynote speech. I was a bit disappointed with it as it detailed all the changes that have happened in Microsoft development tools in the past 20 years or so, that Clarion developers hadn't had to deal with. I was expecting more about what Softvelocity was doing and had planned for the future, rather than what Microsoft has changed or not changed. You can in fact watch the keynote speech and some other recordings at www.cidc2011.com or watch the keynote speech directly at http://nicetouch.adobeconnect.com/p6587t5e4a4/ Diego Borojovich went over changes, improvements, fixes and new features implemented in the Clarion 8 IDE compared to Clarion 7.
Softvelocity had three one and half hour sessions about the Clarion IDE, using Clarion.NET controls in Clarion 8 and using Clarion for web and mobile integration. I have to admit that none of those sessions were particularly fluent or interesting. I felt that Softvelocity was not well prepared. Many of the slides had a lot of typos and grammar errors and they looked a bit quick and dirty - not exactly what I was expecting. I certainly appreciate the work Softvelocity has put into Clarion 8 to make it a pretty good and stable environment, but their performance on Clarion.NET has been far from acceptable, in my opinion.
I only attended 4 sessions fully. Bruce Johnson's "The Road Not Taken" was interesting, particularly since it wasn't about Clarion at all;) It is always fun to listen to Bruce! Shawn Mason's talk, "Optimizing SQL in Clarion" was very good and I picked up a few things from him:) Andy Wilton's talk about "Using COM" was very interesting, particularly since he uses the Clarion OLE control for his COM programming. The generation and use of Interfaces to construct wrappers for COM has been pushed pretty hard and many people have completely dismissed using the OLE control. I watched about half of Mark Goldberg's session on "Understanding Classes/How to Clarionize API" which was very good. I wasn't going to miss Rick Martin's talk on his "SQL ODBC direct class" no matter what and it certainly didn't disappoint me!
The finish was Robert Zaunere talking about the future road-map, taking questions and wrapping things up. Softvelocity is planning to release Clarion.NET with the application generator in about one month. They are also planning a student license program and a demo version of Clarion and said those should be ready in about 3-4 weeks. A Clarion.NET add in code generator for Visual Studio is on the drawing board. Clarion will also be parking the "good" old WMF files for the print engine and going to EMF. WMF (Windows Metafile) format dates from 1990 and EMF (Enhanced Metafile) was first introduced in 1993, so neither is exactly new technology. EMF+ was introduced with Windows XP, released in 2001 so even that is 10 years old. WMF was supported in both 16 and 32bit, but I believe that EMF was only ever supported in 32bit. EMF+ supports GDI+ calls, where as EMF only supports GDI calls. Based on what I find, EMF does a better job at rendering some graphic components, such as curves and fonts so we might see better and sharper rendering of graphic elements and text.
I had a lot of people visit me in the Solutions room. I'm really bad about remembering names, so I'm not going to try, but I'm really grateful and appreciative of all the people who came and said hello! I had a great time meeting all of you. It got a bit crowded at times and I sincerely hope everybody was able to get my attention - I'm a bit hard of hearing and in a crowd it gets worse! If not, I apologize, and please drop me an email if you have any questions:)
I was staying at the Red Roof Inn, literally next door to the Rosen Center where the conference was. I saved almost 60% on that compared to the Rosen Center and since it was basically a room to sleep, I didn't really care, and the 3 minute walk back and forth was good and refreshing!
All in all it was a very good conference. I had hoped to get some more exciting information from Softvelocity during my stay, but we'll see how things progress in the next few months. It was absolutely fantastic to see all the people I have been corresponding with via email or on Skype for years and never been able to put a face to.
I want to end this by thanking John Hickey and Arnold Young for all the hard work that they put into making this conference a success! Their relentless work on the webinars and the two Clarion Live conferences is greatly appreciated by the Clarion community! Lisa Daugherty has also been helping John and Arnold with the webinars and was in charge of the registration desk at CIDC. Keep up the great work guys!
