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Application Generator news

We're a couple weeks past our projected release date for the first build shipping with the Application Generator, and I'm overdue in posting this update, my apologies to all of you for that.

Some of you are surely wondering what the problem is, and wondering have we hit some unsolvable problem. And the answer is No, we have not, but what we are doing now is debugging some fairly difficult problems.

We have all the supporting components (Editor, Embed editor, Formula editor, Window Designer, Report Designer, File Schema pad, etc.) fully integrated with AppGen, and fully functional, and you can get a very good feel for the working status of the Application Generator itself by watching this video that Bob Foreman put together.

After watching the video you are probably wondering where are the problem areas, looks like it's ready for the world, right? Well almost, but we have a few remaining problems that we are debugging, these problems are failures at the Windows API level, and they are not from direct API calls that we are making, but rather from high-level access through the Win Forms layer. The problems manifest when a deeply nested window fails to open, or its controls may display incorrectly, often it is working correctly on XP and failing on Vista, or vice-versa. Those problems have proven just a bit elusive, because theoretically they shouldn’t happen. But we all know that when you have a non-trivial application you are bound to run into a few non-trivial problems, and those types of problems excel at quickly eating up hours of the code/build/test cycle.

But I want to be clear in telling you that in this first public release of the Application Generator, all of the core functionality for processing templates and generating code is working very nicely. We have just a couple of these tricky problems to solve, and our expectations are that we'll have these resolved and get the Application Generator release into the hands of 3rd party vendors in 7-10 days. As soon as the 3rd party vendors have had a bit of time to get their respective products ready, we will move immediately into a general release.

By the way, Bob’s video is very good, but it didn’t cover one very nice Application-related feature that I think most you will find very useful in your day to day work; the “Applications” pad component, which provides functionality like a batch compiler (plus much more). And while a Solution is capable of compiling multiple applications, the “Applications” pad offers some flexibility that is not available in a Solution file. For instance you can quickly generate code for one App or for every App in the pad, without needing to open them for editing, and it makes other often used functionality readily available. Here’s a link to a short video featuring the “Applications” pad component in action. In this video I open the C6 version of the DLLTutor.app, and as its being converted the process detects its dependent Apps, causes them to also be converted, adds them all to the new Solution file, and loads them into the Applications pad.

Thanks again for your patience, the release of Clarion7 and Clarion.Net are together the single biggest steps Clarion has taken since I became involved with the product back in 1990, and all of us are sure it will prove to be worth the wait.

posted on Saturday, September 27, 2008 5:58 PM by Robert Zaunere

# re: Application Generator news @ Saturday, September 27, 2008 2:19 PM

Hi Bob(s),

Looking very good.

Regards

S.Jayashankar

# re: Application Generator news @ Sunday, September 28, 2008 10:34 AM

Bob -

Will there be any update going out to CSP customers before App Generator release?

Rakesh

rakesh

# re: Application Generator news @ Monday, September 29, 2008 4:59 AM

Bob Foreman sounds happier than ever, this must be good.
I hope I can avoid the excessive use of mouse though...

bhavnen

# get free publicity @ Saturday, October 25, 2008 10:26 PM

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