Category: Icetips Products

Author Published on Leave a comment

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

Author Published on Leave a comment

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

Author Published on Leave a comment

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

Author Published on Leave a comment

For the past 2 weeks I have been working on getting out new releases that are compatible with Clarion 9.

There are currently three new builds available, Icetips Utilities, Icetips Previewer and Icetips PowerToolbar. There are minimal updates to those products and as far as I have tested they seem to work fine with Clarion 9.The only major change in PowerToolbar is that the install now includes the required files from XPTheme to support additional themes in PowerToolbar.

For the past week I have been working on Outlookbar. I had started work on it in January before the car accident so I decided to finish it. The main new features are a wizard to create the Outlookbar side window and a global class that controls the height. Another feature is the ability to set font information for both headers and tasks. that includes font, font size, font color and font style.

In addition to this I'm also working on technology to use external theme files for Outlookbar, Taskpanel and PowerToolbar. This will make it possible to create and distribute themes with programs and full control over the visual presentation. The idea is to create a theme designer where you (or your users) can create their own themes or modify existing themes.

I had originally planned to have all my installs done today, but that is not going to happen because of the extra work on Outlookbar. Right now I'm aiming for next Friday, the 31st.

Finally I want to mention our Icetips support portal where you can post support requests and check our Tips and Tricks forum, which has some interesting articles about our products, Windows and SQL.

Arnor Baldvinsson

1

Author Published on 1 Comment

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

Author Published on Leave a comment

One of the forums on our Zendesk portal is "Tips and Tricks"

I have posted two short posts there about hiding DOS/console program windows when using ITRun, ITRunFile and ITRunWait from the Shell Class and one about getting table information from MSSQL database.

I will be posting more short tips and tricks there so check it out from time to time:)

Arnor Baldvinsson

Author Published on Leave a comment

We have made Icetips Utilities build 1.2.2408 available for download This Utilties build includes quite a bit of documentation (about 50 pages total). The Page of Pages class has been documented and we added a control template to the Utilities so it is easy to add to your applications. Both the class and the template are fully documented. We also added a global template that allows the Utilities to be used in Legacy applications. I made some modifications to the String Class that affects the SplitString method. Note that our online (HTML) documentation for our products contains comment options using Facebook. This allows you to comment on any page in the documentation if you want to add examples or comments about specific methods or templates. We will be adding this to our HTML pages as we release new builds. Both the Utilities help and the PowerToolbar help now have Facebook comments at the bottom of every single page. For more detailed information about the updates and fixes please see the online documentation at http://www.icetips.com/manuals/utilities/version_history_2012.htm Documentation was completed for:

  • List procedures with Windows without HLP attribute.
  • Limit Program Instance template.
  • All Utilities templates.
  • Write Version info to INI file template.
  • Add Header Sort to Queue template.
  • Bind/Unbind local variables template.
  • Icetips Browse Checkbox update template.
  • Icetips ShowFileRecord wizard.
  • All Code templates.
  • Documentation reorganized so work better with both printed (PDF) and online (HTML) formats.
  • Every page in the online (HTML) documentation now has Facebook like and comment option at the bottom of the page.

Fixes:

  • ShowProgress in Progress class applied "vista fix" on XP also which could cause weird jumping in the progress bar.
  • SplitString could fail with last item in the item array.
  • Limit Program Instance template didn't preserve variables for entries (i.e. !Glo:VarName)
  • GetThemePanelFEQ returned the wrong FEQ.
  • ThemeAPanel didn't work in C8 and required XPTheme.

To download the latest build please go to http://www.icetips.com/downloadfile.php?FileID=192 You need to be logged on to download. Note that the installation keycode is displayed on the page and is also sent to you via email once you start the download. You can review the updates in the documentation at http://www.icetips.com/manuals/utilities/version_history_2012.htm

Author Published on Leave a comment

The Icetips Utilities build that was supposed to go out last Tuesday will not go out until tomorrow. I got on a really good roll with the documentation and decided to keep going while it lasts:)

While you wait, you may want to check out this link to Free Books at Microsoft press. They are all available as PDFs and some are also available as XPS, .mobi (Kindle) and .epub.

If you have a Kindle or Kindle Fire and you would like to convert the PDFs to .mobi for your Kindle, then download the MobiPocket Creator Publisher Edition from MobiPocket.com It will convert your PDF files to .mobi and in my experience they work much better than the free Kindle conversion at amazon.com. The MobiPocket Creator Publisher Edition is free and simply installs on your PC.

Arnor Baldvinsson

Author Published on Leave a comment

I have made a quick update to PowerToolbar by releasing build 2.0.165. I got a report this morning that a message window was showing up when selecting an item from a DropButton. I checked and indeed there was a Message() statment in a method there that I had used for temporary debugging and not removed when I was done:( I very rarely use Message() but rather use OutputDebugString, which I use in a method that's called ODS in all my classes. So I routinely do a search for any uncommented ODS statements but I missed that Message() statement!

Arnor Baldvinsson