Clarion.NET close encounters

I’ve seen Clarion.NET in action. Well actually it was something that WILL by a Clarion.NET. But from the beginning…
There was a Clarion Developers Meeting in Cambridge last week. I was there at 27th and 28th of July 2006. I’ll skip the Clarion “Core” part, because its irrelevant for us (.NET developers). I’ll say only one thing, I thought it’s a common knowledge that when you are making a presentation, you are not supposed to read all that you have on your PowerPoint slides – the attendees are getting the whole ppts, they surely can reed 😉
I was waiting anxious for Clarion.NET presentation. I’m tired of shuffling the data in .NET manually (writing a code to manage the database connectivity, care about the relations to object mapping, and so on). I don’t see the point for developer to worry about database while writing business code (to some degree of course). In my imagination I saw a big future for a tandem: Visual Studio 2005 + Clarion.NET. You make all the boring data centric work in Clarion.NET and when you have something sophisticated to do (e.g. Web Service) you grab VS. What I saw was rather disappointing: actually all there is to Clarion.NET right now is ABC (Clarion intern language) language “compileable” to IL. Sure that’s not trivial to write new .NET language buts not that what’s make a RAD RAD. There was no presentation of application generation and data dictionary – because they are no ready yet. So Clarion.NET right now is noting more than new language for .NET Framework. I can think of a better name right now, it will by ABC.NET. Good news: the whole Clarion.NET with templates and data dictionary should by available this year – so Softvelocity CEO Robert Zaunere. Another good news: according to my CEO they are never showing their products before they are fast ready to ship. I surely hope so!
clarion.jpgLittle technical info about Clarion.NET. The IDE is taken completely from SharpDevelop. The “visual” part of SharpDevelop has not changed a lot. Actually when you create new document in Clarion.NET you get the default SharpDevelop class template. I hope that Clarion.NET will keep the extensible architecture of SharpDevelop and developers will by able to write their plug-ins. The Data Dictionary Designer wont by written in managed code and will by based on ADO.NET (no out of the box support for other O/R mapping). I haven’t seen anything about templates.
So yet a little disappointed, I’m waiting still anxious for Clarion.NET. I hope only that I won’t reach the average age of a “normal” Clarion developer (which is something about 104 years old 😉 before I’ll see the Clarion.NET in action!
Originally published at Thursday, August 03, 2006