All our products are now available with Clarion 8 compatible installs except XPTheme. IF you need XPTheme with your project, just copy files from C7 or C6 if you are using Powertoolbar. I'm still hunting down one bug in the list box header in XPTheme and will release a new update when I've got that nailed, but no later than Friday, May 6.

Emails will be going out to customer in couple of hours with direct download links:) If you run into any problems please let me know as soon as possible! This has got very minimal testing in Clarion 8 so please let me know if you have any problems!!!

Arnor Baldvinsson

When Clarion 7 came out we immediately found a problem with PowerToolbar as it was not able to theme the menus in Clarion 7 at all. The API calls that walked the menus to gather data about each item would invariably fail to extract the menu text from the menu handle. At first it sounded like Softvelocity would change this, but after a while it was obvious that it would not happen.

So I had to go digging for a different solution to this problem. And I am happy to report that I have found it! PowerToolbar is now completely capable of theming menus in Clarion 7 just like Clarion 6. It took a while to dig it up but I have come up with a solution and so far it is working perfectly!

Another problem with PowerToolbar was that it would not be able to use the original Office 2000, Office 2003 and Native XP themes to theme the menus and toolbars under Vista and Windows 7. The reason was a chunk of code that took an awful lot of time to execute and would simply not make the menus presentable because of how slow it was. I'm again happy to report that I have found what seems to be a perfect solution to this problem. I'm still testing this solution but so far it is looking very good!

I need to run some more comparison tests between XP and Vista/Win7 as well as Clarion 6 and Clarion 7, but I'm very optimistic that these two problems are now solved! This is the last bit of major issues that I have been tackling in my products and really hope that this is the end of it. I still need to do some clean up in the code etc. but I will be done testing this by the end of this week and will release a public PowerToolbar beta next week so those who are interested can start testing this.

Arnor Baldvinsson

When we took over the PowerOffice utilities in late 2008 we inherited a few problems. Problems that were intricate, complicated and seriously daunting to work on. So I kind of let them slip and ignored them for a while hoping that as I gained knowledge of the products and the code I would be able to figure these things out and fix them. At the same time I knew that I would not feel comfortable with these products until I fixed those problems and I would not feel good about promoting them!

In December last year I got extremely busy working on a project for one of my clients and had to kind of put these things on the back burner. When I finished that project in late January and I realized I was seriously behind my own schedule of releases I made a promise to myself to get those things fixed before I released new builds! If nothing serious comes up I will finish the fixes this week:)

The problems were in 3 products, Build Automator, PowerToolbar and XPTheme.

The problem in Build Automator was related to a random failure of the Copy/Paste option where it would fail badly and could even corrupt the project data. I knew the code works as it works almost all the time, but in rare occasions it will fail. I have never been able to duplicate it - it happens once in a while, I'd say perhaps 1% of the time I use it. After going through the code over and over again I realized there was a weak spot that could possibly cause this problem. I have plugged this vulnerability in a beta build that is out in testing now and I hope it will prove successful!

PowerToolbar had two problems. Firstly Menu theming was not possible when using PowerToolbar in Clarion 7. Clarion 7 uses owner drawn menus and in some cases those are known for not playing nicely with some API code that extracts information about the menu items. In my case it was the text that the API simply could not extract at all. I am currently working on a solution that is promising and I hope I will have it finished by the end of this week:) Secondly, PowerToolbar had a random problem with menus not being themed. This problem almost had me beat and it took multiple tries over the past two years to nail down the problem. As often, the problem proved to be very difficult to identify and very simple to fix! I wrote a blog entry about this fix just over a month ago and you can read more detailed description of it here.

XPTheme had one problem that was illusive and difficult to get to grips with. It had problems with list box headers, particularly when it came to groups, group headers and column headers for groups. It also had problems with scrolling the headers correctly if there were fixed columns and scrolling list boxes with the keyboard if the HSCROLL attribute was missing was not supported at all. For the past two months I have been working hard on fixing the issues with the list box headers and scrolling and it has been in tough beta testing now for the past month or so. I am very happy to report that for the past week I have not got any reports about any further problems:)

I expect that next week I will start pushing out new updates to those products. With those fixes I'm feeling comfortable again about promoting and selling my products and feel good about tackling any other problems that may come up!

Arnor Baldvinsson

We have made version 2.0.143 of Icetips Taskpanel available for download at http://www.icetips.com/downloadfile.php?FileID=155.

You need to have a valid Gold subscription and be logged into your Icetips account to be able to download the new install. To purchase a Gold Subscription please go to http://www.icetips.com/subscribe-gold.php and to renew, please go to http://www.icetips.com/renewsubscriptions.php

You can access the documentation online in html format and you receive the chm and PDF files with the install.

To read more about the Taskpanel update, please view my post on our forum Note that this install is the first of Clarion 7.3 compatible installs. We have tested all our installs and products under Clarion 7.3, as I blogged about earlier. We have just received a second Clarion 7.3 pre-release build which should fix the threading issue that we found when testing our Previewer demo! I will test it later today and expect to push out all the new builds for Clarion 7.3 tomorrow if no problems are found:)

This version of the Taskpanel changes a bit the way ampersands in headers and items are now shown. There was a problem with this in the older versions and since the ampersands made no sense as hot-keys, I have changed this so that ampersands are always shown exactly like they are entered into the headers and items. I.e. "Name & Address" will show up exactly like that. "Name && Address" will show up as "Name && Address". If this change causes issues, please let me know as soon as possible!

Arnor Baldvinsson

If you wander over to ClarionEdge you can find all kinds of cool things for Clarion. This is where Brahn Partridge posts his gold nuggets on how to improve the look and feel and functionality of Clarion! I haven't had a chance, personally, to explore much of his stuff as I just found this yesterday morning!!! But I most definitely will take a good look at this and will blog about my findings later on:)

Brahn has a new post about a theme addin for Clarion 7 that can give it a completely new look. Among other themes, it has themes for Office 2003, 2007 and Office 2010 look!

Another addin that Brahn is working on and looks like it will be very useful is an Editor Macros addin. Macros are something that is sorely missing in Clarion 7 and while Brahn says this is still very much work in progress, it will be interesting to follow up on this.

Brahn has other addins for the Clarion 7 IDE. If you are using Clarion 7, I suggest that you do yourself a favor and go check it out!

Arnor Baldvinsson

1

For several months I have not been able to do much with the new Clarion 7 IDE because of crashes that would happen pretty frequently or about every 10 minutes. Needless to say that is not productive in any way and in fact I have stayed away from it, hoping that Softvelocity would get the IDE more stable. It has been a frustrating experience as I have tried many times to make the IDE work for me, with the only reliable outcome being consistent, yet random and unpredictable crashes or the IDE has simply disappeared without any warning.

Last week I was contacted by a customer who was having some odd things happening with a Legacy (clarion template chain) application in Clarion 7.2 that used our Previewer and asked if I had experienced any issues. I have to admit that I don't do much product testing with Legacy anymore and haven't tested any Legacy apps in Clarion 7. So I decided this would be a good time to create a small legacy app in Clarion 7 and see how it worked. To cut a long story short, an hour and 5 crashes later I had a Legacy app that compiled and worked fine and reported that to my client. But the experience was anything but good. 5 crashes and a feeling that the IDE was very fragile. Admittedly I was running it on an older computer with XP and not much power in it, but still. I also have Clarion 7 on my Vista64 quad core computer with 8GB of RAM and I had experienced exactly the same issues on it as on my XP.

A friend of mine, John Hickey of GoPositive Software and ClarionLive fame contacted me this morning and offered to do a private webinar with me to see if he could help get over those crashes as he has been using Clarion 7 for a while. Arnold Young also chimed in as well so we could all compare settings and see what was going on. We spent an hour talking about the different settings and John shared with us what changes he makes that seem to make the environment much more stable than the default settings that Clarion 7 comes with, which I have been using with not so good results.

After we were done, I repeated my Legacy app creation and while there is a bug somewhere in the Legacy Wizard and/or the TXA import other than that problem (which leads to a crash) the rest went smoothly. No other changes were made, i.e. I did the test on my old XP machine, with the same dictionary, same Clarion 7.2 build (7283) and same steps. So I'm very happy to report that those changes do seem to have cut the random crashes down completely. I messed with the app a bit for about half an hour and C7 was just humming along nicely and no problems in sight. Below I'm detailing the settings that I changed based on John's advice and he graciously allowed me to post this information on my blog. I really hope this may help others who have been having those random, yet predictable and very frustrating crashes, to become productive with the new IDE!

To start, select "Tools | Options" from the main menu. Select the Clarion entry in the list on the left and it will expand to show several nodes of Clarion specific settings and select the "Clarion | Clarion for Windows | General" node as shown below.

Clarion - General

By default the second radio button is checked, "Parse all hand coded projects in the solution and only applications opened for editing" and the "Use lightweight parsing mode" is also checked. The change that we made here was to select the "Disable project parsing" This affects code completion, but this apparently is one of the major cause of crashes.

Next navigate to the "Text Editor | Clarion specific options | Code Completion"

Code Completion

The change we made here was to uncheck the "Enable Code Completion" turning code completion completely off. The Code completion adds quite a bit of time parsing the projects and sources and this seems to be contributing to the instability of the IDE.

Since we are in the Options window, there are two more settings that will improve your experience, while not contributing to fixing the crashes, but since we are already in this window we might as well look at them!

Navigate to the "WINDOW Structure Designer | General" node and in the "Designer Area Options" check the "Show Property Toolbar".

Window Structure Designer

Now repeat in the "REPORT Structure Designer | General node:

Report Structure Designer

When you open the Window designer or the Report designer you will now see the familiar property toolbar from the older IDE where you have quick access to the text, use variable and font settings of the selected control, see below.

Command Toolbar

The final tip on the performance and crashes is found in the application options. So close the Options window and use "Tools | Application Options" from the Clarion 7 main menu. Note that if an application is open, this menu item is disabled.

This will bring up the "Application Options" window.

Application Options

The changes we made there were to turn the Auto-Save OFF by setting the "Auto-save limit (MB):" to zero. This may or may not contribute to the crashes. John has this set to zero while Arnold was using the default setting of 16MB. I have set it to zero to start with.

While you are in there, if you haven't done so already, you might want to consider turning off the "Require a dictionary" checkbox at the top. It is not of much use but can cause problems if you open application that do not have any dictionary as you will not be allowed to save them!

That's it! I will be using these settings to start with but what little I have done today indicates that these changes have added considerably to the stability of the IDE. If you have any further tips or suggestions to improve the stability and user experience of Clarion 7 then please do not hesitate to send me an email or comment on this blog.

PS: If the IDE is indeed stable with those changes I will start to add them back one at a time until I hopefully can put my finger on what and where the instability is coming from and that might help Softvelocity in their quest to fix this.
Arnor Baldvinsson

We have made Clarion 7.2 compatible builds of all our products available for download from our website. You can now go ahead and download the new installs. All subscribers should have received an email from us with the download links. If you haven't please check your spam filter and if you still haven't received it check the email address in your Icetips account or drop me an email to let me know:)

You need to have a valid subscription to be able to download the installs. If you need to renew your subscription, please go to http://www.icetips.com/renewsubscriptions.php and purchase a renewal. If you do not have an Icetips Subscription, please go to http://www.icetips.com/subscribe.php to purchase.

Arnor Baldvinsson

Today we have discovered a problem in the latest Clarion 7.1 build 6849. This problem affects most of our products and will cause a GPF in the program at runtime. What I found out was that the #PDEFINE template statement, which we have used for years to add defines to the project, doesn't fire in this Clarion 7.1 build so classes that depend on their own defines in the MODULE and DLL attributes are not compiled correctly and will cause a GPF when the classes are instantiated.

I have reported this to SoftVelocity's Problem Tracker and I really hope that this will be fixed in the next build.

If you converted projects from Clarion 6 to 7.1 with our products in them, you should be just fine. This only affects templates that you have added to applications in this latest build of 7.1 and possible some of the latest builds as I'm not 100% certain when this stopped working.

I am also looking into an obscure problem in the SQL browse template that only shows up in 7.1, when the GreenBar is being used and only when a new column has been added. After then app has been closed and re-opened the problem goes away and also if the actions for the SQL browse have been entered after a new column has been added. It could be something in our templates or it could be something that is related to the #PDEFINE issue if some statements are not executing correctly.

Arnor Baldvinsson

My client reported a problem when attempting to run our project that was a bit baffling:

"The procedure entry point _18ProtectedHashTable__ct__@FiP15CriticalSection could not be located in the dynamic link library c60runx.dll"

Since all that we are sending back and forth are the applications and no binary files there was no way that we were mixing any binaries up, besides we are using the exact same builds of Clarion 6.3 - 9059 so this shouldn't be a problem at all.

After asking around I found out that the reason for this is that Clarion 7 includes a Clarion 6 compiled version of Topscan, which is not compiled local so they have to distribute the Clarion 6 versions of the DLLs with Clarion 7. In our case, the Clarion 7 Bin path has been added to the PATH variable, either manually or by an installer (we do not know which one if it has been done by an installer). Not just that, it has been added in front of the Clarion6\bin folder in the path causing the Clarion 6 application to pick up the C60RUNX.DLL from the Clarion 7\Bin folder rather than the Clarion6\Bin folder.

After some experimenting, I found that at least for Clarion 6.3 build 9059 I could have both BIN folders in the PATH as long as the Clarion 7 one was after the Clarion 6 one. The Clarion 6 apps still run without problems and the Clarion 7 Topscan also runs correctly and without problems as far as I can tell.

So, IF you want to put the Clarion 7 BIN folder into the path statement, make sure that you do that after the Clarion 6 BIN folder. Normally you do not need to do this, but if you don't want to copy DLLs to the application folder using the PATH do access the binary files is one way to do it.

Update: It appears that if you are using Clarion 6.3 build 9056 it does not conflict with the C60RUNX.DLL file in Clarion 7.

Arnor Baldvinsson