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Seattle Magic Users Group Newsletter
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 | Next Meeting: October 11, 1995 |
| Last Meeting |
| Magic Wins Again! |
| Train the Trainer |
| Make DDF |
| Map to Aero Controls |
| Address List |
Next Meeting will be hosted by Aero Controls, in Auburn (for all you lucky Renton and Tacoma people!). See the map later in this newsletter. Denise and Heidi will be returning from the Droege Competition in North Carolina, fresh with news of how Magic did there. Heidi has also come back from a train the trainer' session in Minneapolis, and will have some tips and tricks they taught there.
John Cole will demo some of his work using Magic 6.0 and DDE.
Dale has collected several interesting files from the Magic BBS. They will be available at our next meeting.
Also there was a request that we republish the address list. You will be able to pick up a copy at the next meeting. If any of you do not want your address and phone released, please tell Heidi before the next meeting.
Our last three meetings have been hosted by Paccar, and included some great Pizza and discussions. Thanks for hosting these meetings!
Marilyn asked some great questions about a program she had that was running very slowly (hours). Various people gave her some tips, and at last report the program now takes about six minutes.
Marv Swan from Paccar gave a demo of Grafsman, which is a nice graphing program that one can call from Magic to view online graphed reports.
We welcomed a new member, John Cole, who has moved to the Seattle area from Texas. John is a very experienced Magic programmer, having used the language since the 2.5 release. Come see his DDE work at the next meeting.
Thomas Titus talked about a spell checker named Share Spell.
Magic has worked around the windows 3.1 issue mentioned at previous meetings. But if you are interested in a free Windows 3.1 to Windows 3.11 upgrade Microsoft has a free upgrade available from their bulletin board. The file name is WW0981.exe. The phone number of the Microsoft BBS is 206-936-6735. Or come to the next Users Group meeting and pick up a copy of this and other BBS files that Dale has collected.
By Heidi Schuppenhauer
Last month Dale and I were invited to compete in an invitation-only database challenge' at the PC Database 95 conference in Seattle. In this competition, contestants had a month to develop an application: then, at the conference, were to make modifications in a shoot-out lasting four hours.
Jeff Winchell, of the Sapphire Group, had not even heard of Magic and was not going to
include it in the Challenge. But, while looking for ideas from the Droege Competition, he
noticed that Magic took 5 of the top 10 places, and decided it should be represented. He
saw my name on the list and asked if I could compete.
We thought it would be a good learning experience, and since I'm so immersed in Magic I
like to see what is going on in the rest of the programming community, and this seemed a
perfect opportunity. At the conference would be representatives from most of the major
database programming languages, and some of the better programmers would be at the
shoot-out.
Magic sent up Arie, from tech support, Emmett, from Sales, and Noam , who is on the board of directors in Israel, to man a booth at the conference. On Sunday we helped man the booth, and on Monday we took part in the competition.
The results were interesting, to say the least. Several other database languages accepted the challenge, including Access, Delphi, Visual dBASE, Visual Foxpro, and Visual Basic. On Friday, two days before the conference, 6 of the 8 teams were not finished with the initial specifications. Some of them said the database platforms they were using could not handle the Client Server' portion of the specifications: others said the application couldn't be written in the time period allowed in any language.
So we declared the two remaining teams -- ourselves and programmers from the D-Base R&D department -- to be the finalists. We were judged on both the first release (1.0) and the second (1.1), after the four hours of changes.
Our team won, and we learned a lot during the process. For one thing, even though the contest was labeled as not needed to be GUI', most of the points we lost were because we didn't exactly follow the windows standard'. I say standard' in quotes because the tester involved wanted things according to one Windows standard, while many Windows standard programs I use actually adhere to another standard. But at any rate, there was very much a Windows bias. Second, although the points on judging were fairly close (most of the judges gave both teams close to a 100%' score -- they were being easy) the application we developed in Magic really did include more features and was more of a finished app' than the DBASE team was able to develop. The new 6.0 interface can make some truly nice Magic programs, and it showed -- even on the new screen I wrote in the 4-hour crunch, even though I'd never used the 6.0 screen painter before.
All in all, we left the conference feeling very much confirmed in our choice of Magic as our company language. The problems' that were addressed by proceedings on specific languages were often things we do every day in Magic without even thinking about it: things like accessing nonnative databases or working in client-server mode. Our ability to run in Dos and Windows was so unique no one believed it.
Some of the languages I'd heard good things about turned out to be more code-intensive than I thought. Delphi, for instance, while it has a great screen painter, seems to require low-level Object Oriented code to do actual processing. Oracle, on the other hand, is coming out with a Magic-look alike. The folks at Magic regard this as a good thing in that it will validate the whole table-driven paradigm, but will be aimed at a different sector of the market.
What was sad was to see 4-6 talks on Paradox programming and only one intro. to Magic. My goal, when this conference happens 2-3 years from now, will be to have enough Magic programmers around that we have a group of Magic seminars too.
By Heidi Schuppenhauer
In September I attended a Train the Trainer' course in Minneapolis. This course was required for all Magic Training sites, and included the latest information on Magic, including hints on upgrading to 6.0.
I learned a lot in the class. First of all, the Magic courses have all been completely revised. Each course includes a complete workbook, which includes programming exercises and their solutions. The courses are much more complete than they used to be.
Second, two new courses have been added. Magic for Professionals' goes into more of the nitty gritty issues of installation, client server, and optimizing performance. Upgrade to 6.0' gives hints on upgrading programs to Magic 6.0, including tips on using the Forms editor and GUI design issues.
Trillium Custom Software, Inc. is committed to help support the Magic programmers in this area in any way possible, and as part of this effort we try to keep up with the latest changes to Magic.
Magic6.0 & BETRIEVE6.15
Since the release of Magic 6.0 a couple of our members have had to deal with Magic 6.0 and Btrieve 6.1x installation and upgrade issues. A file on the Magic BBS (available at the next meeting) describes the steps needed to upgrade a networked version of Magic 6.0 using Btrieve 6.15. If you have standalone installations that need to use Btrieve 6.15 you should talk with Dale before planning your upgrade to Magic 6.0. Among other things you will need to purchase a Btrieve 6.15 for Windows product since Magic only ships a Btrieve 5.x version.
Cueto & Cueto, a computer systems group, is selling an in-house Magic add-on called Make DDF'. They sent us the following press release. I have more information on Crystal Reports and MakeDDF that will be at the user group meeting for those interested.
(Advertisement follows)
As a Magic Developer, I've always wanted to give my clients a report writer that let them see and manipulate all of their Btrieve data. I've sent letters requesting that this be a part of the runtime package and even attempted to write the report writer myself.
Over a year ago, I decided that my customers had to have these capabilities. I started to purchase and review all of the available report and extract packages such as Data Junction, Report Smith, Forest and Trees, Spinnaker, Xtrieve Plus and Crystal Reports. If I could give my customers the benefits of the packages, they would be better informed, more profitable, and consider their systems invaluable.
Interfacing Magic to these packages proved to be a huge task because all required the building of DDF files to describe the Btrieve file structure. After researching this for several months, I decided to write a program that would take a Magic Data Dictionary (version 5.0 and up) and make a DDF file set.
I've called this new program MakeDDF, and you can now interface even your large applications quickly. The process involves installing the MakeDDF programs on your hard drive, exporting your Magic Data Dictionary to a disk file, then running MakeDDF (a Stand alone Dos program). Your DDF file set will be built in the subdirectory where the Magic data files reside.
If you are a developer, you can now provide a service that all of your users will want. If you are an end user with access to your Control File, you can generate reports and look at data in ways that you can't even imagine.
In a recent test, I built the DDF for a 120 file dictionary in four minutes, and using Crystal Reports, I designed an Open Invoice report in under 2 minutes. Magic is the fastest application development tool available, but using my DDF builder, Magic Btrieve data files, and Crystal Reports, I have cut development time 70%! In the same test, I selected a graph report and developed a full color pie chart of their 26,000 customers in under 5 minutes, including calculation time!
For questions or order information, please call (301) 733-4886 ext. 17
Articles?
Wouldn't you like to share your experiences with your User Group associates? Well this is just a reminder that this newsletter is for all of our benefit. Please feel like you are a part of it and as such we would like to publish your thoughts and experiences that the rest of us might benefit from. Please call Heidi with any ideas you are thinking of writing about, or if you need some assistance or encouragement.
Hot News Flash
Droege Competition, NC; Judges have selected the top six finalists. 5 out of 6 finalists are Magic teams including the team of Heidi Schuppenhauer and Denise Schallaci. Come to the Users Group meeting this Wednesday to hear the final results and to congratulate Heidi and Denise for an EXCELLENT job!
{Original map not included in WWW version}
{Original address list not included in WWW version}
For information about the Seattle Magic Users Group, please send snail
mail requests to:
Conjurings C/O Trillium Custom Software, Inc.
PO BOX 609
Lake Stevens, WA 98258
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