The object of this tutorial guide is to get you comfortable with the basic concepts of Causeway, and to teach you the skills needed to design and build effective Gui applications with Dyalog APL and CausewayPro. It assumes that you have access to the CProQA workspace which contains all the examples used in the Tutorial, as well as sample dialogues for all the supplied Causeway classes.

It is vital that you get a clear understanding of the concepts outlined in the first section: if you really take to heart the idea that a Gui control is simply the visible manifestation of some variable(s), and that Causeway will do what is needed to update it when any of those variables change, then you are well on the way to writing reliable Windows applications in less time than you would have believed possible.

Of course there is still a lot of learning to do, but once you have mastered the basics of the Designer you should be able to get the visual side of the application developed very efficiently. Then you need to start finding your way around the extensive library of classes which are supplied with the system. These range from the simple (and obvious) elements like edit fields and buttons, to quite complex objects (like the TreeView control) which have many built-in functions and are almost a programming environment in their own right.

The Application Tutorial section is intended to show you how you can hook together some very basic file functions with a simple but functional Gui front-end, to make a useful ‘contacts manager’ application. It carries on to illustrate tabbed dialogues and an approach to MDI subforms. You can cheerfully skip both these sections – come back to them when you need to do something similar! It also covers the possibility of integrating the RainPro charting software and the NewLeaf report generator into a Causeway application. Again you can skip both these sections if you have no interest in business graphics or reporting.

The final section of the Tutorial shows you how to take the class template and generate a completely new class (a currency-formatted number) which integrates seamlessly with the supplied class library.