Archive for the 'General' Category
14 Jun
What is the Delphi component that you can’t live without?
The on demand replay for the "Extreme Cross-Platform .NET with Delphi Prism 2011" webinar is now available at http://forms.embarcadero.com/forms/AMUSCA1006DelphiPrism20116-2.
I’ve always been a big Jeff Duntemann fan, because he’s a great writer, an interesting guy, and because he’s been a Pascal/Delphi fan from way back. [...]
Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
6 Comments
30 May
I had occasion to write a little routine called CoinFlip:
function CoinFlip: Boolean;
begin
Result := Random > 0.5;
end;
I don’t know why I found it mildly amusing. And I bet someone will tell me that it is slightly biased in one direction. Because it is. Anyway, thought you all might enjoy it, too.
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Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
19 Comments
26 May
DataRage 2 is going on right now, and it is not too late to get involved.
Delphi Prism 2011 will be generally available very soon, and Marc Hoffman has a good rundown on what you’ll get in this significant release. My favorite part is the support for VS2010 right as this new version is out. You [...]
Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
19 Comments
24 May
This guy on StackOverflow has a question about the best desktop development platform. Maybe you guys have some suggestions for him.
Did I post this link to an article in SDTimes about Delphi Prism 2011? One of the cool additions to the product is the integration of CodeSite Prism Edition from Raize Software. CodeSite allows [...]
Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
20 Comments
23 Apr
Okay, so for this first installment, I’ll be illustrating one of my core principles for developing applications: All my code of any importance at all goes under source control. All of it.
I’m all by myself – why should I use source control?
We ask about source control use on the annual survey, and a surprisingly large [...]
Posted in Best Practices, General by: Nick Hodges
34 Comments
16 Apr
SamContacts is a “Simple Address Manager” that enables you to quickly and easily manage your contact information.
You can read more, or take a quick tour on their website.
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Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
1 Comment
15 Apr
Okay, first up: I’ve put the tests and updates for DateUtils.pas on CodeCentral.
So far, I’ve been writing tests in a pretty organized way. But I write each individual test, one at a time. I often end up writing a lot of “piece-meal” tests by hand. I end up with a lot of code that [...]
Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
5 Comments
14 Apr
Okay, so after that last post, and after all the fixes that I did, things have settled down a little bit. I thought I’d take advantage of this interlude to tell you some interesting things about TDateTime in Delphi, because along the way here, I have discovered a thing or two along that way that [...]
Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
8 Comments
13 Apr
Okay, so when we last left off, IncMillisecond was still failing in certain circumstances. Let’s take a look at that. Note, too, that I have this crazy notion that if you have a function called IncMillisecond, then it should be able to, you know, increment a millisecond.
Here is the IncMilliseconds that you very [...]
Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
10 Comments
16 Mar
First of all, thanks for the help improving the CreateRandomDate function. I confess that I didn’t spend enough time thinking on it, and I’ll also confess that you guys are way smarter than I am. ;-) I’ll post the “updated” version for your perusal in a separate post.
In addition, you all were right – [...]
Posted in Fun with Unit Testing, General, Unit Testing by: Nick Hodges
4 Comments
10 Mar
Okay, so I’m a Development Manager. My job is to see to the health, welfare, productivity, effectiveness, and proper tasking of a big chunk of the RAD Studio development team. I share these duties with the excellent and capable Mike Devery. I mainly manage the guys that work on the IDE, the RTL, and the [...]
Posted in Fun with Unit Testing, General by: Nick Hodges
29 Comments
05 Mar
I was talking with a customer yesterday. It was a pretty typical conversation – they have a big investment in Delphi, with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. They had built a major application for a major business using DataSnap and dbGo (formerly ADOExpress). They had started to build some new web systems with [...]
Posted in Aspect Oriented Programming, Delphi, Delphi Prism, General, ednfront by: Nick Hodges
6 Comments
16 Feb
Hey, Delphi at the Olympics! Cool that Marco spotted that.
Sunday was the 15th Anniversary of the launch of Delphi. As I’ve probably said way too many times – I was there at the launch at the Moscone Center that fateful evening in 1995. It really was a thrilling event. The whole two days was [...]
Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
6 Comments
12 Feb
The Haiti Auction continues apace. Thanks so much to all of you who have purchased items and helped to raise a lot of cash for the people of Haiti. Many of the items have been sold, but there are still many items out there to be bid on. (Why you all aren’t jumping over this [...]
Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
6 Comments
01 Feb
Okay – the Haitian Auctions are live! Three pages of historical goodness and fun, all for a good cause – with more to come, I believe.
Note, that even though the auctions state:
“90% of the final sale price will support Clinton Bush Haiti Fund (Small deduction may apply. Learn more)”
all the proceeds for the auctions go [...]
Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
3 Comments
30 Jan
Anders Ohlsson has posted a couple of “sneak peak” auctions to make sure that our system is working.
http://shop.ebay.com/andersohlsson/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_from=&_ipg=25
Bid early and bid often! Look for more opportunities next week.
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Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
1 Comment
27 Jan
As some of you may know, we are moving our offices to a new location here in Scotts Valley. This beautiful, big building we are currently in (and that was built and owned by Borland for many years) isn’t matching up to our needs anymore, and we are moving to a shiny new place very [...]
Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
4 Comments
11 Jan
Okay, the response to TSmiley has been amazing. At least ten of you have downloaded it. Unbelievable. I’ve even made a few updates to it. And I’ve checked those updates into the Subversion server on SourceForge. I’ll try to keep up with the ZIP file download, but seriously, you really should get used to the [...]
Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
5 Comments
06 Jan
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve been “teased” about TSmiley, I could finance my own startup.
TSmiley, for those of you that don’t know or haven’t heard, is maybe the very first third-party VCL component ever. I built it for the first time way back in the fall of 1994 when I [...]
Posted in Components, Delphi, General by: Nick Hodges
25 Comments
21 Dec
Jud Cole and SOCK Software have been long time Technical Partners of Borland, CodeGear and now Embarcadero, and they have recently released version 2.6 of their flagship product CodeHealer that includes full compatibility with RAD Studio 2010.
In case you haven’t heard of it, CodeHealer is a powerful and easy to use source code analysis [...]
Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
16 Comments
14 Dec
Okay, the Update to the Update is out. You can download it from the Registered Users page or you can let the IDE do the update for you by checking for updates. To find out more, you can read the README. I know you all always read the README, right?
You probably have some questions. [...]
Posted in General, ednfront by: Nick Hodges
34 Comments
13 Nov
This week we were in the early stages of rolling out what was to be “RAD Studio Update 2” with a large number of bug fixes. We put the update out on the web and the registered users page, and posted an article on the Embarcadero Developer Network. We were excited, because there are a [...]
Posted in CodeGear News, Community, Delphi, General, RAD Studio by: Nick Hodges
54 Comments
07 Oct
Here’s a chart showing the results of the poll I took on what TurboPower projects are of interest to you. (You can certainly still take the poll if you want, but the trends are pretty clear by now…)
Seems that a lot more of you than I would have guessed are using AsyncPro. I was also [...]
Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
15 Comments
18 Sep
Nice writeup about Delphi 2010 in Dr. Dobbs. Money quote: “And even with all the views activated, the IDE response remained lightning fast throughout my hours of testing it for this review.” (Thanks to Marco for the tweet pointing me to this article….)
Alex Ciobanu works in our Iasi, Romania office as a document writer, and [...]
Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
3 Comments
12 Sep
PowerArchiver 2010
“PowerArchiver 2010 offers hundreds of features, yet remains easy to use, small and fast. Novice users will find a familiar interface complete with tutorial and detailed help, while more experienced users can take advantage of full Explorer integration, multiple encryption methods and advanced compression algorithms.”
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Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
5 Comments
11 Sep
If you are a GExperts user, I’m interested in knowing what your five favorite features of that outstanding Delphi Add-in are.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=adxkD_2bIluwT5FgQf8bwSag_3d_3d
It’s a nice, short (two question) survey. Please take the minute or two to fill it out if you care to.
Thanks very much.
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Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
27 Comments
09 Sep
I’ve created a short, eleven minute video showing the basics of Aspect Oriented Programming with Delphi Prism. AOP is a really cool, powerful, and easy to use language feature of Delphi Prism.
You can read more about AOP and how it works on Wikipedia. You can read more about the specifics of Aspect Oriented Programming [...]
Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
4 Comments
25 Aug
There have been a bunch of sneak peaks and blog posts and a lot of attention paid to some of the “flagship” features in Delphi 2010 like Gestures, DataSnap, Firebird connectivity, IDE Insight, the Code Formatter, and more. Cool stuff, to be sure (and you can find out more about all of these cool things [...]
Posted in Community, Delphi, General by: Nick Hodges
10 Comments
13 Aug
Christine Ellis just posted this on our newsgroups:
Hosted on the Embarcadero Developer Network, CodeRage is four full days of 100% online technical sessions focused on software development and data management issues which you can attend from wherever you like to log in. It’s bringing you top industry speakers, technologists, and industry practitioners to present on [...]
Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
3 Comments
06 Aug
Okay, I’m a big fan of the new tool palette – and I’ve said so pretty often. I find the new one very, very powerful and very, very easy to use, and I find it somewhat mysterious that some folks don’t prefer it. But many of you have disagreed, so now, back by popular demand, [...]
Posted in General by: Nick Hodges
57 Comments