As expected it's been a busy day. The morning keynotes began at 8:45 a.m. and the last sessions closed down just after 6 p.m. Highlights for me today included Josh Berkus on securing PostgreSQL (lots of food for thought there) and Atlassian's proposed open source identify management API (which put me in mind of the recent ClarionMag articles on LDAP). I'll have an article up on the Atlassian project shortly; I'm still going over my PostgreSQL notes and I'll also have something to say about the keynotes, plus I have a few more pics of the conference.

In the conference center parkade this morning I spotted an old beater with a couple of stickers in the rear view window. One simply said "Linux", and the other said "Coding is not a crime." Dude. I've seen code that was worthy of punishment. It's just about time for the keynote addresses. Meanwhile I have a couple of tutorial reports from yesterday that need some cleaning up - hopefully I'll get a chance to post them before the day is out, but I have a pretty fully schedule alerady. Ah, we're rolling now with a video parodying video game development. "When you create sound effects, do they come out of your head?" "No, they come out of my mouth." Heh heh.

Atlassian's Dave O'Flynn announced a new (and as yet unnamed) open source identify management project at OSCON. Atlassian's effort is intended to address the shortcomings of existing identification systems such as LDAP, SAML and OpenID.

An O'Reilly Radar report released today estimates that perhaps 10% of all new IT jobs involve at least some open source software. The report cites explosive growth in open source projects, draws on analysis of job posting data and considers a number of case studies.

In his Pro PostgreSQL tutorial session Robert Treat covered a variety of topics including understanding the nature of the PostgreSQL community, performance optimizations, upgrade paths, availability and hardware.

Australia aside, there's been a dearth of Clarion conferences lately. But that doesn't necessarily mean there aren't conferences out there that are of interest to Clarion developers. This week I'm at OSCON 2008 which is O'Reilly's annual open source conference held, as usual, at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. Portland's something of a hotbed of open source development and attendance is usually around 2500-3000, which is a wee bit more than your typical Clarion conference. But this is an open source conference, and Clarion is a closed source product. What exactly is ClarionMag doing here? In my experience there are are plenty of Clarion developers already using open source products and tools. For the most part that means databases such as MySQL, Firebird, PostgreSQL and Ingres, and web tools, of which there are a great many (Apache and PHP are popular choices). At OSCON I'm focusing...

This week (July 21-25) Clarion Magazine is at OSCON 2008, O'Reilly's open source conference held annually in Portland Oregon. Stay tuned for daily reports...

Next week I'll be in Portland Oregon for OSCON 2008, O'Reilly's open source conference which typically draws around 2500 developers. You may be wondering what I'm doing at an open source conference, given that Clarion is a closed source platform. In fact many Clarion developers use open source tools, particularly databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and Firebird. Quite a few Clarion developers also use open source web tools such as PHP. And while open source isn't quite as common in the Windows world as it is among Linux users, it's gaining ground. At OSCON I'll be paying particular attention to the database and web tracks but I'll be reporting on anything I think is of interest to ClarionMag readers. Stay tuned!

UserControls in Clarion# are much like control templates; they are a way to bundle up multiple controls and related source code in a single package which can be easily reused. Randy Rogers shows how it's done.

The new IDE's editor is a vast improvement over the C6 source editor, making it an appealing choice for template editing even in advance of the AppGen. Dave Harms shows how easy it is to set up coloring rules for template source.

Sometimes software can be in use for years before someone stumbles across a major bug. The other day Lee White needed to add an image resource to a C6 application, and to help pick out the file he needed from a directory with a lot of images he began the file name with --, as in --yada--.bmp. The app saved and compiled fine, but the image file corrupted the project. Result: next time Lee opened the app he got a "Syntax error in project file" and the .APP file was unusable. The problem won't happen if you have a single leading dash in the file name; you need two dashes. Lee suspects the parser is getting confused because two dashes are used to denote comments: #compile "junk_BC0.CLW" -- GENERATED #compile "JUNK_BC.CLW" -- GENERATED #compile "junk.clw" -- GENERATED #compile "junk001.clw" -- GENERATED The solution is to hex edit the APP file, find the offending file name in the project data and change the -- to some other string. After that your app should be...

The Clarion Magazine Source Code Library has been updated to include the latest source. Source code subscribers can download the June 2008 update from the My ClarionMag page. If you're on Vista please run Lindersoft's Clarion detection patch first.

A new Whitemarsh Information Systems short paper on function point analysis is now available for download. See item #13.

DMC 1.4.0.1 is now available. Changes include: SQL query environment; Clone to DAT/DBF; User option for a Sum Up display screen of the Main Wizard (with canceling possibility); Direct access in Viewer to the last 25 most recently used tables (all formats); All Data Management screens redesigned to accommodate more space (better visibility); Data Management Task wizard - define step by step your task (change source and / or destination settings without losing pace); Create ODBC wizard; User option to read only first 50 records before reaching the Mapping tab; Define the Color of all List Box records; List of all SQL Key's in Structure Tab - Structures stored in clipboard; List by ... processes changed to working on queues (speed); Processing of Columns to define if DATETIMEs are present also changed to working on a queue (speed); Bug fixes.

Read comments from DevCon participants at Geoff Spillane's message board.