Clarion.NET beta impresses

Published 2007-11-17    Printer-friendly version

SoftVelocity released the long-awaited beta of Clarion.NET today. It's been a loooooong wait for this baby, and I'm very happy to have it installed on my computer at last. As expected, this release does not include the AppGen (that will come later) but it does include a C6 template utility that lets you generate a functioning browse/form application from the data dictionary of your choosing. You load up an app in C6, run the utility, and then look for the Clarion.NET solution in a newly created subdirectory under your app directory.

The Clarion# code that utility templates generates is instructive on a few levels, and I'll get back to that in a minute.

This beta isn't just about desktop (that is, WinForms) applications. You can also use Clarion.NET to create compact framework (mobile) apps, as well as ASP.NET web applications. Basic examples of both are provided, along with a bunch of other stuff. See the just-updated Clarion.NET FAQ for more. And Clarion.NET is a multi-language IDE, which makes sense since it's a marriage of SV's IDE code and the SharpDevelop IDE. So you can write apps in C# and VB.NET as well, and you can mix languages within a solution.

While the lack of templates/AppGen means large scale development is a ways off for most of us, there is a whole lot you can do right now with Clarion.NET.

Now, about that source code. It isn't ABC, that's for certain. There are a lot of classes in the namespace Clarion.Windows.Forms, but there are also some familiar constructs like views, and source code that manipulates views for display in list controls, and stuff that otherwise looks like Clarion code. And there are event handlers that functionally are pretty similar to virtual methods that contain ABC embed points. In other words, while the code isn't ABC, it's not entirely unfamiliar either, and it's not that hard to see how the concepts behind the ABC template set can be adapted to this new Clarion#/WinForms code.

I hope some of that makes sense - I'll have more to say in upcoming mag articles when I've had a chance to absorb all this a little better.

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