Everyone,

Greetings and welcome.

As you may have heard, Clayton Jones, one of the long-time and respected 
members of the Xbase++ development community, recently passed away. 
Clayton was the author of the Topdown library, and other development 
products, which many developers have used over the years.  In his will, 
Clayton stated his desire for his software development tools to be 
entered into the public domain for free use by other Xbase++ developers. 
  I was assigned the responsibility of making sure this request is 
carried out.

I informed Alaska Software about Clayton's wishes, and they have 
graciously agreed to host the source code for Clayton's development 
products.  They are currently in the process of creating a software 
repository where the software can be downloaded.  Once that is ready, I 
(or someone from Alaska Software) will post a notice here in this 
newsgroup to inform everyone that it is ready for use.

There are five development tools that will be available...

1. The Topdown library - a set of pre-defined functions and classes for 
rapid development of Xbase++ applications, complete with demo

3. The Topdown forms designer - a GUI forms designer

4. X-Memo - A set of functions that replaces DBT/FTP memo-fields with 
DBF files

5. Spell-X - Provides spell checking for XbpMle objects (X-Memo library 
required)

6. X-DBU - A GUI database utility

This new "Topdown" newsgroup was created so people can post questions 
about Clayton's products here.  We thought it best to have a separate 
newsgroup, rather than trying to answer questions in the "third-party 
products" newsgroup, since Clayton's products will no longer be actively 
developed or officially supported.

I have agreed to be the moderator of the newsgroup, since I was a friend 
of Clatyon's, and I want to do my best to see his final wishes 
fulfilled.  However, I am NOT an expert on all things related to these 
products, so I may not be able to answer all your questions. I would 
welcome any help I can get in providing answers to questions posted in 
this newsgroup.  

Thanks to all,

Chris Carmac

Thanks Chris, Frank++ and Alaska Software for getting this repository 
online.  Chris, you're right -- Clayton would be very proud.

And of course a huge thanks to Clayton.  His request for his software to be 
placed in the public realm speaks volumes about his approach to life.  May 
he rest in peace.

Bill Simmeth
Merchant Software Corp
Marshall VA USA