The month/year ahead

I expect 2009 to be a banner year for Clarion development. Over Christmas, SoftVelocity released the C7 AppGen to CSP program participants, and another update is expected this week. I'm not as sanguine as SV about an imminent gold release, but real progress is being made on the beta.

SoftVelocity has also promised an update to Clarion#, presumably with LINQ support and other goodies. And although I don't have any confirmation from SV, I expect this will be the year we see the first .NET templates.

There have been over a thousand messages posted in the beta newsgroups since the Christmas release. I'll be summarizing the discussion in an article to appear later this week or early next, but in general those postings fall into the following categories

• Education - learning how things work/where things are in the new IDE
• Usability - some tasks are faster in C7, others aren't (yet). Achieving a C6-like level of keyboard shortcuts is a hot topic.
• Installation problems - leftovers from previous betas can cause some perplexing issues
• Architectural issues - there are very few of these, but one that comes up often is multi-app solutions and the time to load the registry for each.

Look for the monthly PDF and source code library updates by Thursday at the latest; the January articles will begin appearing early next week. Some of ClarionMag's most popular authors make appearances this month, covering topics for C6, C7 and .NET.

And be sure to go to the home page and take the annual ClarionMag survey about your business prospects for the new year. I've reviewed the results for previous years, and there's an interesting departure so far (with admittedly only about 30 responses). In any given year around a third of respondents expect their business to stay roughly the same; that's the case this year as well. But in all other years "somewhat better" gets more responses than "much better", and "somewhat worse" gets more responses than "much worse". This time around those response rates have reversed. Given the current economic climate I'm not surprised to see increased pessimism; in any given year 10-15% of respondents expect a decline in their Clarion business. This year that figure is a little over 20%, so far. But those expecting a "much better" year also outnumber those expecting a "somewhat better" year. The extremes are, curiously, more prominent. Perhaps the release of new product from SV has some developers stoked, just as economic issues have others worried. And perhaps the numbers will smooth out after a while and go back to the bell curve.

In any case, recessionary times can actually produce opportunities for software developers. For some companies a slowdown in business means an opportunity to review existing systems and invest in IT, something that's much more difficult and dangerous when everyone's scrambling to keep up with orders. Consulting opportunities may also increase as firms are less willing to take on new full time hires.

Posted: January 7 2009