Category: Icetips Blog

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Update: This has been fixed, see this post.

It appears that something in Windows 10 breaks the mouse wheel scrolling in Icetips Previewer!  In the latest Windows 10 Technical Preview (10130) and at least some previous ones if not all of them, it just doesn't work at all. 

computer-mouses

I haven't been able to find any references to a problem with scrolling in Windows 10 so this must be a very isolated case.  Guess it's time to take a look at that sub-classing code I added in back in March 2006 - more than 9 years ago!  My gosh, how time flies! 😎   This does not seem to be Clarion version specific as this is happening in applications compiled in Clarion 6.3 as well as Clarion 10 and with new and old builds of Icetips Previewer.

Hope you all have a good weekend - I'll be spending it with debug view on my Windows 10 virtual machine!

Arnor Baldvinsson

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It was brought to my attention today by Lee White that the manifest for Clarion 10 is set to "asInvoker" This means that the IDE is NOT elevated when it runs. This can cause problems.

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For example if you are used to seeing the  "Process Running" message if you accidentally left the program running that you are compiling, you will not see that in Clarion 10.  It will simply give you an "Access denied" error at the end of the linking process.

To fix this you need to make a small edit in the Clarion.exe.manifest file in your Clarion\Bin folder.  If you load it into an editor you will see a line that looks like this:

<requestedExecutionLevel level="asInvoker" uiAccess="false"/>

Change this line to:

<requestedExecutionLevel level="requireAdministrator" uiAccess="false"/>

save it and you are done.  Now the IDE will open elevated and the "Process Running" warning will once again work as it should.  Note that to get the warning you must turn off the "Kill running process before build" or Clarion will simply kill it without prompting.

2015-06-10_1244

 

I have been running the Clarion IDE as elevated since Clarion 7 came out and never had issues with it.  But apparently some people have had problems so Softvelocity decided to change the manifest in Clarion 10.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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One of the very cool things in the new IDE is the support for XML help. This is the information entered into .INC files using triple exclamation mark (!!!) comments. This makes a quick help accessible right in the IDE.  I have been working on documenting the ITUtilities.inc file and I'm about half way through it.  It doesn't replace the documentation but once I have gone through and documented the ITUtilities.inc it will be much easier for me to dig through getting the full documentation done.

Below is an example from the ITImageClass in the Utilities:

!!!<summary>
!!! Sets the position of the image withing a boundary control.
!!!</summary>
!!!<param name='pImageFEQ'>The control with the image</param>
!!!<param name='pRelativeFEQ'>The relative boundary control</param>
!!!<param name='pX'>Adjust horizontal placement</param>
!!!<param name='pY'>Adjust vertical placement</param>
!!!<param name='pJust'>Justification of the image inside 
!!! the boundary control</param>
!!! <para></para>
!!! <para>The horzontal justification can be one of:</para>
!!! <para> IT_IMAGE_JUST:LEFT</para>
!!! <para> IT_IMAGE_JUST:CENTER</para>
!!! <para> IT_IMAGE_JUST:RIGHT</para>
!!! <para></para>
!!! <para>The vertical justification can be one of:</para>
!!! <para> IT_IMAGE_JUST:TOP</para>
!!! <para> IT_IMAGE_JUST:MIDDLE</para>
!!! <para> IT_IMAGE_JUST:BOTTOM</para>

In the IDE, when you are entering the name of the method in the editor it will show you a tooltip with all the information above:

2015-06-06_12-32-46

Click on the image to load a full size screenshot.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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It's been a bit of a rough ride to get the website moved. I ended up not going with my previous hosting company, rather moving the whole mess over to Hostgator.com.  That presented several challenges, but stubbornness prevailed 🙂

Reason being that Softsys Hosting did not offer a migration from one server to another so I'd have to manually move everything.  Since I was paying them almost $100/month for managed windows hosting, I felt they should be able to migrate my things from one server to another within their domain.  Well, they didn't see it that way, so I decided to save myself a bundle and go with linux hosting at Hostgator.  I'm only paying about 18% of what I was paying at Softsys Hosting.

This came with some pain and suffering though.  All my mySQL databases had to be renamed as Hostgator insists on a user prefix for all databases.  That again required changed in multiple scripts on my side.  Sessions are more sensitive on Hostgator than on previous hosting so they were causing errors all over the place.  Got that fixed.  Then had problems with my ordering process and got that going, but found out that it wasn't sending the emails it should have.  Softsys Hosting doesn't allow using the php mail() function but rather insisted on using an email class.  Worked great there, but didn't work at all on Hostgator so I had to change all my email class calls back to using mail()

After just over a week, I think everything is now back and running as it should.  If you run into any problems anywhere on the site, please let me know!

Since I was doing this, I decided to change the software I used for the Icetips blog and have started using Word Press.  The forum has also been upgraded to the latest and both have been set up to run on subdomains, so you can use blog.icetips.com to get to the blog and forum.icetips.com to get to the forum.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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Sometime in the next few days our server will be moved from one virtual server to another with more RAM and more disk space and SSD, so it should make the website even faster:)  I don't know the schedule for this yet, but I'm hoping it will be today or tomorrow (Thursday May 21st or Friday May 22nd)  I don't think there will be any disruption by this move, maybe a downtime of a few minutes while the host company switches things around, but please be patient if the site goes down!

We have had occasional problems with the email server crashing because of low memory and that should be a thing of the past:)  I do not think we have ever lost any emails due to these crashes.  I'm planning to get our other websites over to this server in the very near future.

About 6 weeks ago I manged to fall down the stairs - yes that took real talent! - and almost break my right ankle.  I have had to be very careful about keeping my foot up and ice it, which is rather cumbersome when sitting at a desk!  It's much better now, but there is still swelling and I have to be careful when walking.  So things have moved very slow on everything lately and I apologize for how quiet it has been!

Clarion 10 is just around the corner and all our installs have been ready for some time except the CheckboxFixer which by accident didn't show the Clarion 10 option when installing.  There is a new build on the website with that fix.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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I was staring at a completely unfamiliar window in a client project and had no idea what procedure it came from.  It was a form, so I didn't know what the original caption was and the strings on the window were pretty generic.  I needed a way to figure out what procedure this was.  Instead of spending time doing searches I decided to chance tactics and use the WindowsInitCode procedure from the Icetips Utilities to do it for me.  I explain the process in my latest Icetip.

What I did was to create a control on the window with the procedure name, as well as put it in the window caption and send it to DebugView with OutputDebugString (ODS method available in all Icetips classes)

Enjoy.

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We have been asked a few times if we could make a zip with all the installs available. Now we have, and with the help of Build Automator, it is now a "one button" process that I can run as I upload new builds 🙂  The install files are in a password protected zip file that you can download.  Note that you must have a Gold subscription and be logged in to be able to download.  I have not made a separate download for the silver subscriptions.  The current zip file from April 14, 2015 is 96,198,707 bytes in size and contains all 14 product installs that we currently have.

I have finally been able to move Build Automator up from Clarion 6.3.  I was not able to compile it in Clarion 9.1 because of a "unknown compiler error" that would come up in one of the classes.  However, Clarion 10 was able to compile it just fine.  I've had to make some minor changes here and there - the splitting on the main window is now using a different splitter template than originally, but so far I haven't seen any problems with it.

I'm planning to get the new build of Build Automator out in April - unfortunately it just didn't make it in March!  I'm not going to say anything about other plans as that's an absolutely sure way to mess them up! 🙂

Arnor Baldvinsson

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At long last our web and email servers were moved to a new host this weekend.  There were some interruptions and there are a few things we need to fix up before everything is back to normal. But the website is back up and our email is back up.  I do not think we lost any email, it all seemed to come in once the transfer was complete, at least it seems I got all the spam I usually get 😉

I will be out of the office more and less from Tuesday, December 23rd to Monday, December 29.  I'll be checking my email from time to time, but will not be putting in much work!

Sue and I wish all of you Happy Holidays and hope you all have a Happy New year 🙂

Arnor Baldvinsson

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Build Automator 2014

 

We have released Build Automator 2014 build 4.9.1325

The update can be downloaded from our website at http://www.buildautomator.com/download.php or by using the "Check for Updates" option under the Help menu in the program.

There are several new features in this build, but there are also a lot of fixes behind the scene that make the program more stable than it has ever been.  The new feature list includes:

  • Full support for Clarion 9 and 9.1
  • Full support for Setup Builder 8.1
  • Support for Code generation before build in Clarion 8, 9 and 9.1
  • Improvements in copy/paste and several fixes to synchronization in the project window
  • File and folder Drag & Drop support in actions
  • External text files can now be included in the "Write text to file" action
  • Programs can be forced to run elevated (will prompt for administrator access)
  • Environment variables fully supported in scripts
  • Search locators make finding projects and variables easy

In previous builds there was a bug in the system that could sometimes lead to the wrong action being loaded, copy/paste being fragile, duplicating the wrong action item and so on.  This should be completely fixed now.  For more detailed list ofnew features and fixes please check out the version history page athttp://www.buildautomator.com/onlinemanual/version_history.htm.

One of the major new feature is the updated MS-Build action which you use for Clarion compiles.  It fully supports all versions of the Clarion IDE, from Clarion 7 to Clarion 9.1.  It now also supports code generation in Clarion 8-9.1.  Code generation was not possible in Clarion 7.  There is one caveat that I don't have any solution for:  Softvelocity does not allow Clarion Professional to generate code with their ClarionCL.exe, which is the tool we use to generate code.  This is unfortunate as it limits the usefulness of this feature, but never the less, it is an important update for us.

Another feature that I want to highlight is the option to include external text filesin the "Write text to File" action.  This allows you to generate files that include data from other sources.  For example I have started using this to generate the export list for templates that need it.  I generate the export list with an external tool, then write template code to a text file which has an Include statement which includes the export list.  End result is a template file completely generated by Build Automator!  How cool is that?!

Arnor Baldvinsson

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For the past couple of days I have been working on a theme designer for Powertoolbar, Outlookbar and Taskpanel.

The theme designer create theme files, which are basically INI files, that can be used to set the colors for the products. Each theme file has all the information to be used with all three products so the color schemes used in the products will be 100% consistent. Each product will be changed to make this work in such a way that you are either using the built-in color schemes or you use themes. There will be no mixing the built-in and external themes. However, the built-in themes will all be delivered with the new products so you can specify the theme. You will be able to use a fixed theme or you'll be able to allow user selection of themes.

The theme designer will be included as an exe but the source will probably made available for download as well. The source will require that you have all of the three products installed as well as Icetips Utilities (and perhaps other tools as well) It will only be made available as a Clarion 9.1 application, which I'm using to develop it. Currently I have no plans to provide translation of the Theme Designer, but it is pretty simple and intuitive as it is. I will post screenshots later this week to show how it looks.

This will take some time to finish, but I'm planning to get this ready to ship in October or early November. Each product will need quite a bit of work to make this happen and documentation will need to be updated.

Build Automator is coming out this week. I ran into a snag with the install that set me back a day and then I had a problem with my computer which set me back another day and I decided to push it back over the weekend.

Arnor Baldvinsson