All attendees received a current version of C7.1 to play with and I can tell you it's a real feature rich and stable version. There's an awful lot to really like about it. It will be available to everyone else in the very near future. We also witnessed the substance of the Clarion.NET application generator. Due to inherent problems migrating the application generator from C7 to Clarion.NET it was decided to completely rebuild the latter generator. This obviously has caused delay in releasing Clarion.NET with an app gen but this is far better in the long run and is now very much on track and with expectations of a release in the first or second quarter of next year.

The 2 days of Clarion.NET training showed us all just how much .NET is the future of programming and probably the future of SoftVelocity. The power that .NET brings to your projects is quite an eye-opener. The absolutely brilliant thing about Clarion.NET with its complete round trip code generation is that you'll be streets ahead of any other .NET developer because your development time will be way quicker and the underlying code will be very sound. Of course Clarion.NET can be used now just as any competitor's .NET development IDE but once code generation is in place, there simply won't be any other product to compare.

The 2 days of C7 training taught us just how much more productive we can be compared with our much loved C6.3. In fact the theme for the whole 4 days of training was "Exceptional Development Techniques in Clarion 7 and Clarion.NET". What an apt description.

Due to the huge success of the last 2 DevCons I have received numerous emails from people disappointed they couldn't attend due to business or family commitments. To this end Michael Summons very kindly offered to professionally video this year's entire DevCon and to later mix the content to create several DVD's. The video's cover the whole 7 days and the content is pretty darn close to the published schedule at http://www.clarion.net.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=33&Itemid=35 As for quality we had 4 audio sources, 2 CCTV type video sources, 1 data projector output capture, plus screen capture using Camtasia Studio, plus the original powerpoint files. These are all being mixed to give the complete professional package. The packages are being broken up into 2 days of C7 training, 2 days of Clarion.NET training, and 3 days of Convention presentations. If you buy 2 or more components the package is cheaper as shown at http://www.datadownunder.com.au/products.php?cat=10 (see below for further discount). By the way, the package also includes the PDF manual and examples appropriate to the package you choose. The complete training package manual is some 340 pages and the examples some 150Mb.

As expected there is a lot of work in putting these packages together so they probably won't be available much before the end of this month. Especially given that Michael also succumbed to this terrible flu.

For the entire 7 days John Hickey and Arnold Young tuned in via ClarionLive and held interviews on what had been presented that morning and then were able to let everyone listen live to the afternoon's sessions. Due to their support I have organized a 20% discount for any ClarionLive follower. This discount is good until November 15th. If you would like to get this discount then do yourself a favour and check out http://www.clarionlive.com/ . There's some tremendous recorded Webinars on all different topics available there and it's free to register to allow you to download those Webinars. They provide this service to the community free of charge. They deserve all the support they can get.

If you have any question about anything, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Best Regards,

Geoff Spillane
Data Down Under