A 3-day training course on:

Wednesdays, June 5, 12 and 19, 9am to 5pm

at the CTC Computer Training Centre, 4 King St. West, suite 1520, Toronto

This course is offered as a 3-day hands-on session, split over three weeks. Our facility will have PCs equipped with APL+Win 4.0, plus other Microsoft Office tools such as Excel and Access in order to demonstrate some APL connectivity to other applications. Day 1 of the course will feature selected prerequisite topics in Advanced APL. Days 2 and 3 focus on GUI and Windows techniques. Students may register for all three course days, or Days 2&3 only.

To Register:

Please contact Richard Procter, APL Borealis - Training, home/office: 705-434-1239 or rjp@aplborealis.com

Day 1 is a precursor to the following Windows/GUI part of the course. It covers selected advanced topics in APL including:

1. Enclosed Arrays / Nested Arrays

2. Event Handling - Execution of APL Code

3. Performance and Efficiency

4. Idioms/Utilities

APL GUI Programming 101

• Options for GUI programming (past and present)
• Windows Terminology
• Naming Conventions
• Some Issues/Wheels Invented
• What are Objects? - examples and comparison
• Call-Back Functions
• Quad Functions for GUI coding
• What Invokes Action?
• Code Examples
• APL+Win - Objects/Methods/Events Summary

Windows GUI Programming - in Detail

• Naming Objects
• Building and Running an APL GUI Program
• APL GUI System Functions and Variables Summary
• APL GUI Utilities
• The WINDOWS Workspace
• The WINAPI Workspace
• Windows Demonstration Workspaces
• The ]WED Form Editor
• User Commands for the Windows Clipboard
• Exercises

The objective of Day 3 will be to review previous items, and create some fully-developed GUI examples which cover the main issues encountered in typical applications. Other topics can then be explored for the remainder of the day as time allows and focusing on the more popular items.

1. Review exercises and questions from Day 2

2. Further exercises focusing on specific GUI items, eg. menus, toolbar, grid, tabbar, fonts, MDI

3. Selected Topics from the following (as time allows, some of these are large topics):

• Error Handling & Debugging - Eric Lescasse's tutorial for a GUI driven approach to error handling
• GUI Forms Template - Lescasse's approach to GUI dialog forms
• The APL+Win Spy Application - another Lescasse utility used to understand the sequencing of APL+Win GUI events on complex forms
• APL+Win Example Workspaces - useful for demonstrating GUI techniques, DDE, and low-level []wcall procedures for Windows-API usage
• Excel/APL via DDE - DDE is becoming obsolete as an inter-system linkage mechanism, however the examples provided in this demo are instructive for using such low-level tools as []wi, []wgive, []wcall, etc.
• OCX/ActiveX - several Lescasse tutorials using ActiveX controls including the "Formula One" spreadsheet and OCXPrinter for typical printing tasks
• Excel/APL using ActiveX - linking APL to Excel, for dynamic transfer of data from APL to Excel for reports; using APL as a calculation engine within Excel, etc.
• Active Data Objects - ADO - allows APL to read/write any compatible relational database source, using SQL techniques, performance and functionality are significantly enhanced over earlier ODBC-based systems
• Milinta Utilities - for typical development tasks such as code transfer between APL versions or vendor products; code coverage analysis; workspace and object comparison; contextual search and replace functions; and some extensions to the APL+Win ]UCMDS suite of utilities

For more information, please contact: