Nick Hodges

Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #134

Nick Hodges — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:09:51 +0000

We have published Help Update #1 for the RAD Studio 2010 help. You can find out more at the Developer network. The Help Update should be available through the IDE’s automatic update system. If you have that turned off by default, you can invoke it via the Start menu.
Question: Can you ever really have “Release Candidate 1”? If you call it that (as opposed to just “Release Candidate”), is it really a release candidate?
The marketing folks have been busy – they’ve taken your input and created a Delphi and C++Builder Application Showcase page. On that page, you can find all different kinds of applications that are built with RAD Studio, from licensing tools to Client/Server applications to games and media players. If you want to see the power and speed of what can be done with your favorite development tool, that is the place to go. And of course, if you want to be included in that impressive lineup, then let us know.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: If your most current version of RAD Studio is 2005 or earlier, then 31 December 2009 is the last day you can take advantage of upgrade pricing. So if it has been a while since you’ve upgraded, now is the time. That page is also our Upgrade Center, which has information and links about the latest new features, how to migrate to Unicode, and getting your third-party tools updated to the latest version. There isn’t going to be a better time to make the move to the best version of RAD Studio ever.
And of course, if you’ve moved to Windows 7, RAD Studio is the tool for doing your Windows 7 development.

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On the Road with Nick

Nick Hodges — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:21:29 +0000

Hey, I might not be the Delphi Product Manager any more, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t be going out on the road to see customers and show off RAD Studio 2010! I will be making three tour stops as part of the RAD Studio 2010 Road Show. I’ll be doing the Philadelphia, Raleigh, and Minneapolis/St. Paul meetings. (The last one is nice because I’ll get to see my folks and my old running mates in the Twin Cities). Each of those three events will be held “right after work” from 0:600pm – 08:00pm. Follow the links for more information about the venues.

So please sign up – I’d love to see you all again or meet you for the first time, as the case may be. And remember, it’s all free!

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The Delphi Survey

Nick Hodges — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:44:14 +0000

Hey, the Delphi Survey is back! It’s long, but well worth the time. Please go and fill it out as completely and as thoroughly as you can. We really read and study and use and act on the valuable information we get from it. Your opinions really matter and really make a difference. Thanks in advance for taking the time. We really do appreciate it.

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Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #133

Nick Hodges — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:23:51 +0000

First the GOTO was disparaged into oblivion. Then the ‘with’ statement came into the cross-hairs. Is the ‘if’ statement next?
Hey, the CodeRage 4 replays are online – lot of good stuff in there, especially about the new things available for RAD Studio 2010. If you are looking at upgrading, the presentations from CodeRage 4 would be a good place to get a look at what you can do with RAD Studio 2010.
Are you using Windows 7? Want to develop for Windows 7? Delphi is ready for you to do just that.
Learned a new term today: Cargo Cult Programming. (Saw the term on this excellent answer given by Mason Wheeler on StackOverflow).
I know that a lot of you do database management and development. If you do, you should look into DBArtisan. Here’s a nice review of the product if you want to learn more. Being able to write an then really tune your SQL is a good thing. We’ve used the tool internally on our database frameworks to ensure that dbExpress uses the most efficient SQL possible.

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Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #132

Nick Hodges — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:19:35 +0000

Oh, by the way, another good way to get your comments deleted is to use profanity. Should have mentioned that before.
The guys over at Gurock Software have a really cool article called “Working with Delphi’s new Exception.StackTrace” showing how you can get more information about stack traces at runtime.
Want to write an iPhone application in Pascal?
If you haven’t tried IDE Insight in RAD Studio 2010, then you should. It is easy – hit F6 or CTRL+. – and then start typing what it is in the IDE that you are looking for. Cool feature. But here’s the question – what would a 16×16 pixel glyph look like if it represented “IDE Insight”?
Have you checked out all the code samples on the Delphi DocWiki?

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Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #131

Nick Hodges — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 02:56:51 +0000

We are looking for folks to submit their Unicode migration stories to the Unicode Migration Best Practices Cookbook. If you have a tip or two, or a good story to tell, please let us know and help out the Delphi community. Looks like you might win an iPod Touch if you submit something. You’ll also get fame and glory and credit on our web site. Nothing to blow your nose at.
If you are on RAD Studio 2005 or earlier and haven’t yet upgraded, now is the time to do it. Your time for getting upgrade pricing is running out. After January 1, only users of BDS 2006 and up will be eligible for upgrade pricing. And with the release of RAD Studio 2010, there’s never been a better time to upgrade. I may be biased, but I not so humble that I’m not willing to say it out loud: Delphi 2010 is the bestest, most powerfulest and coolest Delphi ever.
I love IDE Insight. You can get get to it two ways, F6 or CTRL-. (I tend to use F6, since that was the “original” keystroke during the beta.) Getting in the habit
StackOverflow Post of the Week: What are good arguments to convince management to upgrade to Delphi 2009 / 2010?

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TurboPower Poll Results

Nick Hodges — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:14:59 +0000

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 surprised at the popularity of Abbrevia, but that might be because that project has probably been the most active of all of them.

I would like to know who among you is still using the DOS-based Object Professional.

So what I am going to do from here is to start at the top of this chart and work my way down. I’ll give each project a review, update the main page for the project to reflect the current status, and attempt to recruit developers who want to work on the given project. I’ll also try to get instructions for pulling and building the project for starters. After that, maybe I’ll look into creating (or getting created) an install for each project so that folks who want to avoid doing the whole “Subversion Pull and Build” thing can do so.

Naturally, if you want to get involved as a developer, let me know.

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Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #130

Nick Hodges — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:10:08 +0000

Okay, some of you are saying that I’m “blocking comments”. So, let me comment on that. First, this is my blog, and I’ll allow or disallow any comments that I want for any reason at all. Sorry. But having said that, the vast majority of comments come through just fine. Some get caught in our SPAM filter, which I check, but not every fifteen minutes. I will, however, delete a comment if it is insulting or “content-free ranting”. I haven’t deleted a comment in a long time. Keep it civil, constructive, and non-insulting and all will be well. I don’t “censor” negative comments that follow those guidelines.
The guys over at TMS Software have a nice free tool for you — TMS FTPUploader, a small free utility for your daily email routine that makes creating a link in your email in lieu of an attachment easier. Cool. And while you are there, give a look to some of the other excellent Delphi components that they have for sale. Lots of very nice, and very innovative stuff. And they are great guys to work with as well.
DataSnap has seen a lot of very powerful improvements over the last two releases, and one of them is the ability to give you complete control over the flow of data between client and the applciation server via filters. The architecture is open, allowing you to write your own filters from processing the DataSnap stream. Daniele Teti has done just that and has created DataSnap Filters Compendium (DSFC), a collection of nine DataSnap filters, released under the Mozilla Public License Version 1.1. This is very cool – both in the sense that it is cool technology, as well as in the sense that Daniele has made this available to the community. Nice.
I’ve been working a little bit on the ShineOn project. I have check-in rights, and have been spending some time familiarizing myself with the codebase. It’s pretty cool – it’s an implementation of the Delphi RTL in Delphi Prism. You know, SysUtils, DateUtils, etc. It’s coming along, and should make porting library code from Delphi to Delphi Prism easier. Check it out, and maybe even help out.

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TurboPower Update #1

Nick Hodges — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:30:04 +0000

Wow – I think that my TurboPower blog post has generated more comments than any has in a while. The response has been gratifyingly positive. There have been a couple of issues and questions raised, so I’ll make a few further points:

Okay, first things first: Is it Turbopower or TurboPower?
Please go to this one question survey and tell me what you think are the five most important projects in the list.
I want to be clear that this isn’t an “official” Embarcadero project. I’m doing stuff “on company time” and off, but this is strictly a community project. We Embarcadero folks are delighted that this code is “coming back to life”, but this is a more of a “Delphi Community” thing than anything else.
I’m going to be, for a very large degree, simply try to be a manager here. I’m probably not going to do a lot of coding, but instead will be counting on you guys to do most of the development here. I’m going to view my role here as a facilitator, cheerleader, and “Making Things Happen” type guy.
I’m not really up on how SourceForge works, so that will be my initial focus here – finding out what you can do on SourceForge and getting things updated.
I’m going to focus on getting these projects working for the post-Unicode world. If the community wants to keep them working for the pre-Unicode world, that is great, and I’ll fully support that. But the focus of my efforts will be on getting the projects working for current versions. I know that this won’t make everyone happy, but given limited resources and focus, that seems like the obvious choice.

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I am now tpsfadmin on SourceForge

Nick Hodges — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:23:11 +0000

There has been a lot of interest lately in the TurboPower projects on SourceForge. Lots of folks have used Turbopower code in the past and are now wanting to bring this code forward to Delphi 2010. There has been a lot of work done in this area already, but unfortunately, the SourceForge pages haven’t always reflected that. Because there has really been only a few people with admin rights to the projets, folks have had to pull down the code, change it, and then post it somewhere else. (For instance, a whole bunch of great stuff can be found at http://www.songbeamer.com/delphi/) . Roman Kassebaum has also been doing some great work getting the code and components ready for Unicode and the newer versions of Delphi.

Over the weekend, I sent an email to the guy who had been the tpsfadmin (TurboPower SourceForge Administrator). That account is the “godfather” for all the TurboPower projects on SourceForge. I asked him what we could to open things up, and I was quite pleased and not a little surprised when he simply sent me the “crown jewels”. So today I logged in, changed the password, and pointed the email address for the account to my gmail.com account.

And so I’m feeling a bit heady about this. I’m definitely not drunk with supremacy just yet, but as Spiderman said, with great power comes great responsibilities. There is a lot of amazing code here, and I want to make sure that as much of it gets made updated and made available to the community as possible. But I should note that this isn’t an “officially sponsored” Embarcadero deal. This is at best “semi-official”. We aren’t officially taking over corporate sponsorship of these projects or anything like that.

Anyway, here are some further notes;

I’ll be going through all 19 projects and checking their status, updating their web pages, and getting the all up to date
If you have Turbopower code that you’ve worked on and haven’t been able to get checked in, let me know and we’ll make that happen.
I think I”m going to pretty much be using Subversion going forward. I’ll be making sure that all the projects have Subversion access.
I think, too, that I’ll put up another little “mini-survey” to ask what are the most popular of the projects. That ought to give all of us a better idea of which projects should be focused on first.

I’m very interested in hearing what the community has to say here. Given that these projects are all open source, community involvement and community input and feedback are critical here. I know there are a lot of you out there that have done a lot of work to maintain things, and I want to make sure that your work is recognized and incorporated for the good of the project as a whole.

As I said, this was pretty much a surprise, but I’m delighted at how things are working out. This should be really fun, and we can really get things rolling again with this great code.

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Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #129

Nick Hodges — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:21:10 +0000

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 he does a lot of terrific work. Many of the great articles in the RAD Studio DocWiki are written by Alex, and they are very good. If you aren’t reading his blog, you should be. In addition, he has some cool projects going, such as the DeHL Library which is a nice set of classes that take advantage of some of the new language features in Delphi 2009. A complete list of features is here. It also has a home on Google Code. There is some seriously nice code in there. Take a look.
Speaking of wikis, Delphi Prism has a wiki as well. There is a lot of good content there, and of course, you are highly encouraged to add to it, update it, correct it, enhance it, whatever. You can log in with our Embarcadero Developer Network account and contribute to the cause.
Got a note from Ann Lynnworth of HREF.com. The HREF folks recently acquired Rubicon, and they have put up a free version of Rubicon on CodeCentral. Rubicon is a really powerful text search engine for databases. It’s the technology that powers the Tamaracka newsgroup search engine, so if you want to get a feel for what it can do, you can visit that venerable newsgroup archive. (I remember using their newsgroup archive searching stuff way back in the early days of Delphi….) The license on the free version limits the number of words that can be indexed and there is a time-delay, but it should be good for lighter-trafficked sites or trialing.
Darren Kosinski helps you navigate through your code.

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Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #128

Nick Hodges — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:10:45 +0000

Okay, question: How do I end up with people on my Twitter following list that I know I didn’t put there? I get these people in my Twitter stream that I’ve never heard of, and – surprise!!! – they are spamming me. How does that happen? (Updated: Let me be clearer — I end up following them. In other words, it’s as if I somehow chose to follow them, but I know I didn’t.)
Did you know that we have our own Channel on YouTube?
Jim McKeeth did a great presentation for CodeRage 4 on doing Silverlight with Delphi Prism. Man, you can do a lot of cool stuff with Delphi Prism.
Jim Tierney did two talks on DataSnap for CodeRage 4, and he’s posted all the code on CodeCentral. Jim also showed how you can use Delphi Prism to talk to a DataSnap server. Powerful stuff.
Pawel Glowacki shows how to use Delphi and Delphi for PHP together.
Great post by Chris Hesik on the various types of debug information that you can use and how to use them.

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Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #127

Nick Hodges — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:48:38 +0000

Time is running out on the BOGO deal. Act now and get a free product. This offer will end soon!
Have you ever had the overwhelming desire to embed a game into the Delphi IDE? Well, now you can, as Chris Hesik shows you the new Open Tools APIs to do just that. Or maybe something development related. Or a game. Whatever.
Closing in on 5000!
Did you know that Delphi now has class constructors and class destructors? Did you know that they work for records, too? Alex Ciobanu does.
One of the myriad of cool new usability improvements in RAD Studio 2010 is the ability to build debug visualizers. Atmapuri has created a video showing off some of the really cool visualizers that he’s built that show off what you can do with this cool new feature.
Picked this link up on a question on StackOverflow — “-2000 Lines Of Code” And here is a guy that got his quota for lines of code in. No doubt about it. Lesson learned: Lines of Code is a ridiculous measurement. Management Rule #312: You get what you measure.

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Cool Stuff with Delphi #28

Nick Hodges — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 23:01:09 +0000

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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What are you doing with Embarcadero Tools?

Nick Hodges — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:45:29 +0000

Tim Del Chiaro, RAD Studio Marketing Manager is asking a good question: What have you built with Delphi and other Embarcadero Products? We’d love to know. So, now is your chance to brag about that cool application you’ve been building all these years. You can help us get the word out about what Delphi and our other tools can do by, well, telling us what you do with Delphi and our other tools.

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What are your favorite GExperts features?

Nick Hodges — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:56:30 +0000

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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Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #126

Nick Hodges — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:18:15 +0000

The invaluable Pierre LeRiche has updated FastMM “FastMM is a lightning fast replacement memory manager for Borland Delphi Win32 applications that scales well in multi-threaded applications, is not prone to memory fragmentation, and supports shared memory without the use of external .DLL files.” Delphi 2010 uses a pared-down version of FastMM because, well, because Pierre is the man.
Mark Edington is alive!
Marco Cantu has a Delphi 2010 Handbook in the works. Marco also has some interesting ideas about how to sell and distribute the book upon which he’s looking for feedback.
Dee Elling talks about the Documentation Wiki – have you checked it out yet? It’s pretty cool. There are a lot of cool things going on there, like Examples, complete articles on topics, and more. You can even contribute. So give it a look.
Jim McKeeth’s CodeRage presentation on AOP Programming with Prism goes much more in depth than my simple demo did. Jim has a bunch of good links on his blog post about AOP and Prism.

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Aspect Oriented Programming with Delphi Prism

Nick Hodges — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:55:25 +0000

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 with Delphi Prism on the Delphi Prism Wiki.

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Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #125

Nick Hodges — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 23:05:55 +0000

Ann Lynnworth of href.com has put together a nice little web app that will show you the CodeRage 4 schedule for your time zone.
Cary Jensen has a really nice article about LINQ in Delphi Prism
One talk you won’t want to miss at CodeRage 4 is “Debugging Techniques for Delphi” by Mark Edington. (Yes, Mark is still alive, though he need to revive his blog…..) Mark is a very skilled IDE R&D Engineer on our team here, and he’s going to be talking about some of the tricks of the trade he’s learned over the years. He’ll also be highlighting his use of AQTime from AutomatedQA.
Cool things you can do with Delphi 2010 #221: Marshall and unmarshall objects using JSON.
Adrian Andrei is far too modest. His blog is not “just another CodeGear blog”. Seeing as Adrian is the DataSnap architect, it stands to reason that his blog will be a bit extra-ordinary.

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Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #124

Nick Hodges — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 18:56:48 +0000

A bunch of guys here on the R&D team are hard at work putting together their CodeRage 4 presentations. Most of the talks will concentrate on the new things you can do with RAD Studio 2010, including new IDE and VCL features. If you haven’t registered yet, I’d strongly recommend that you do so.

The RAD Studio 2010 Reviewers Guide is up.
The Delphi tag over at StackOverflow has now blown right through 2000 questions. And while you are there, see if you can’t see an Embarcadero ad or two.

Dennis Gurock and his guys over at Gurock Software have released a version of SmartInspect that his ready for RAD Studio 2010.
Kim Madsen at Components4Developers seems to like Delphi 2010: “D2010 is just so much faster than the last several Delphi releases, that its an absolute joy to use.”

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Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #123

Nick Hodges — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:47:58 +0000

Hey, RAD Studio 2010 is great – but don’t just take my word for it.
And hey, if you have something great to say about RAD Studio 2010 and want the world to know it, please feel free to email me with your comments. We’d love to have your thoughts included.
Our friends at TMS Software are hard at work. They are updating their impressive array of VCL components to work with RAD Studio 2010. I never cease to be amazed at the cool stuff that these guys come up with. Bruno and his team are good guys, give good support, and are good partners.
This has been sitting in my inbox too long: Many of you guys use InnoSetup – the very powerful and easy to use installation engine. Kyle Miller wrote me to update me on it. He writes: “I thought I would drop a line about a piece of news that may not have been mentioned in the Delphi feeds. Inno Setup, the very popular freeware installer, has been languishing in Delphi 2 & 3 code a many,many years. It looks like Jordan has finally brought Inno Setup into the 21 century by upgrading the code to Delphi 2009. His latest release is 5.3 beta and the What’s New notes mention Delphi 2009.” Thanks for the update, Kyle, and thanks to Jordan Russell for the long support and for proving once again that Delphi is a powerful, capable development platform.
Allen Bauer has had a couple of interesting posts about the new “delayed” directive. An interesting side-note on the second one is the use of the new language feature: class constructors and class destructors.

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Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #122

Nick Hodges — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 05:01:29 +0000

Hey, I’m on YouTube!
According to Julian Bucknall, the CTO for our long time partner DevExpress, they will be supporting RAD Studio 2010 in the very near future. One of the reasons that Delphi and C++Builder are such great tools is that third-parties like DevExpress produce such amazing stuff.
Have you signed up for CodeRage 4 yet? Marco Cantu will be there. You should be too.
So, have you folks with RAD Studio 2010 hit the F6 key yet? (Or, if you can’t stand the notion of lifting your hands from the home position, how about CTRL+. <—that’s a period. As in a decimal point. A dot.)
Some of you have been asking for information about what QualityCentral bugs were fixed in RAD Studio 2010. Well, it’s right here!

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RAD Studio 2010 is Now Available

Nick Hodges — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:12:47 +0000

Well, after a lot of hard work, RAD Studio 2010 is now available. You can buy it this very minute at our shop site and from our excellent partners around the world.

Our team put in a lot of hard work and brain power to get this release done. Quality continues to be the top feature in the product. The language has advanced with new RTTI and Attributes, DataSnap now supports callbacks and data stream filtering, the IDE is more productive than ever with IDE Insight, and the VCL moves forward with gesturing and other goodies. This is a cool release, and it was fun to develop.

Some folks are blogging about it:

Marco Cantu
Chris Pattinson, our Quality Guru, talks quality metrics
David I is taking the show on the road in India.

This new release also includes Delphi Prism 2010. If you haven’t given Delphi Prism a look, you should. Delphi Prism gives you your beloved syntax and language with full access to the .Net 3.5 Framework, including ASP.NET, WinForms, WPF, and Silverlight. Delphi Prism 2010 includes some new capabilities including the ability to connect to DataSnap servers with the new features from Delphi 2010, as well as Aspect Oriented Programming built into the language. Delphi Prism continues to lead the pack in language capabilities and in being the best .Net development solution for Delphi developers.

Also, the great “Buy One Get One Free” offer has been extended for another month until 24 September, so you can upgrade to 2010 and get another Embarcadero tool (of and equal or lesser value) for free. That’s tough to pass up.

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QC-based Features in RAD Studio 2010

Nick Hodges — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:33:00 +0000

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 by attending CodeRage 4 next month.)

“Big” features are always nice and very welcome, but sometimes it is the little things that can make a big difference as well. Pursuant to that, at the beginning of the development cycle for RAD Studio 2010, we did a pretty thorough run through of the feature and enhancement requests in Quality Central, looking not only for the major items, but also for the smaller things that can really make a difference in usability.

The result of that can be seen in this QC query which has over 80 enhancements and features implemented in response to QC feature requests — more if you count the ones submitted by field testers. A few of those were probably implemented in earlier versions, and some were the result of field test requests, but the large majority of them are good old fashioned customer requests that we implemented because you guys asked for them.

Now, that’s not nearly enough. There are tons more great ideas tucked away in Quality Central, and we’ll continue to mine them to find more and better ways to continue Delphi’s lead as the most productive, power Windows development environment on the market.

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FAQ about the W32/Induc-A Virus (Compile-A-Virus)

Nick Hodges — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:50:11 +0000

We posted an FAQ about the W32/Induc-A Virus. Hopefully it will answer those, well, questions that are frequently getting asked. :-) The virus is easy to detect and easy to fix and easy to prevent.

To highlight a few things:

This only affects older versions of Delphi – versions 4 – 7 specifically.
The virus isn’t malicious; it doesn’t actually do anything other than replicate itself. It is really easy to remove, as the FAQ describes.
The particular technique used by the virus isn’t specific or unique to Delphi. It can be used against almost any programming environment. As Craig Stuntz notes in his blog, this technique was first described 25 years ago.
There is a lot of press interest in this, and rightly so. Delphi is a very popular development environment with over 1.7 million users world-wide. Naturally such a virus will garner attention.
Just another reminder to keep your anti-virus software current and up to date.

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Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #121

Nick Hodges — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 04:30:45 +0000

Malcom Groves has more on Attributes in Delphi. Attributes are one of those features – sort of like Generics – that many folks don’t “grok” at first. They look at them and think “It looks cool and everything, but why would I want to do that?” But then they think about it some more and read about it, and suddenly they realize “Ahh, I get it!” and then they start using them all the time. I had the same experience with Anonymous Methods.
DataSnap continues to advance, and with the advent of Delphi 2010, is capable of doing some amazingly cool and powerful things. Why anyone would create a traditional Client/Server application anymore is a bit of a mystery to me. DataSnap Architect Adrian Andrei shows how to do callbacks using the new TJSONObject. He also has posted more on those JSON objects. Jim Tierney blogs about how all of this DataSnap goodness can be accessed via an ISAPI DLL.
Chris White guest-blogs on Chris Bensen’s blog about RAD Studio 2010’s support for SOAP 1.2
Take a fun trip down memory lane – be sure to click the next button at the bottom, there’s more stuff to see.

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Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #120

Nick Hodges — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:56:48 +0000

One minor feature of Delphi 2010 that hasn’t been widely mentioned is the fact that we are including the source code for MIDAS.DLL with the product. This has been a long time request, and we are delivering on it in RAD Studio 2010.
Another thing that didn’t get mentioned much last week during “VCL Preview Week” was the new class called TDirect2DCanvas. I wonder what it does? :-)
Malcolm Groves shows off YACLF* in Delphi 2010.
Be sure to read the interview on BitWise magazine with Mike Rozlog, the Delphi Product Manager.
Another cool feature in RAD Studio – dbExpress for Firebird. Andreano shows it off.

*Yet Another Cool Little Feature

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Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #119

Nick Hodges — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 23:27:47 +0000

Now this is pure genius.
Now here’s a question for you: Does a product even need a “README” anymore? I mean, the classic “README.TXT” was originally supposed to be for “late breaking changes and other information that couldn’t make it into the help”, etc. But in the day and age, shouldn’t that just be an article on the web, and the text in a readme would be “For late breaking information, go to ”? I suppose over time a readme has taken on the role of the “GettingStarted.txt”, but shouldn’t such a document be called, well, “GettingStarted.txt”? In any event, our READMEs have started to take on a more generic tone as we put the “late-breaking” stuff on the web. I suspect in the future, the notion of “readme” and other files will be come quaint and simply contain not a lot more than links to websites.
And along that same vein – why is the default behavior of an office phone to make an “internal” call. Do you call more to internal numbers? I almost never do that. In the rare times when I do make a phone call (instead of IM, email, or Skype), it is almost always to a number outside our phone system. Should office phones default to dialing out, and make it so that you have to dial ‘9’ to get an internal number?
Change Manager will now support Interbase. Look for this to be a trend among DatabaseGear tools.
The Delphi language continues to press forward. Delphi 2010 will include new Run-time Type Information that should blow the baffles off the old system. One nice thing that falls out from that is [Attributes]. Malcolm Groves has the goods, with a promise of more to come.
Have I mentioned VIsualSVN Server lately? I can’t get enough of this tool. First, I think most of us will agree that Subversion is very cool. VisualSVN Server will set up your Subversion server in, like, one minute. Seriously. You download it and install it, and – Boom! – you are done. That’s it. SVN is up and running. The easy to use console app will provide you with a URL, and you are off to the races. Get TortoiseSVN or the command line tool, and you are a source control management fool. I can’t say enough about this excellent, totally free tool.

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CodeRage 4 – September 8 – 11, 2009

Nick Hodges — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:08:58 +0000

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 a wide variety of developer topics, a raging confluence of conveniently-delivered information you can’t get anywhere else. And it’s FREE!

CodeRage 4 includes sessions covering Embarcadero products such as C++Builder®, Delphi®, Delphi® for PHP, Delphi Prism, InterBase® SMP, JBuilder® and RAD Studio. You’ll even find sessions on our award winning database products included in the All-Access suite as well!

Here’s what you’ll get from CodeRage:
* More than 90 FREE technical sessions led by industry and Embarcadero product experts
* An interactive chat area to converse with other software development professionals around the globe, working hard on the same technologies you do!
* Gain knowledge about optimizing your use of the world’s leading software development and database management tools from Embarcadero Technologies.
* Boost your development skills by learning from your peers on their best tips, tricks and processes for software development.
* Visit the virtual exhibit hall – see all the new HOT products out there

*See the complete list of sessions at http://conferences.embarcadero.com/coderage/sessions to pick which ones you want to attend.*

Registration is simple! Just visit the CodeRage 4 Web site (http://conferences.embarcadero.com/coderage) and click the "Register Now" button to sign up for any or ALL of the education and training session days.

We can’t wait to "see" you to CodeRage 4! We hope you’ll join us.

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Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #118

Nick Hodges — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:06:01 +0000

How long will your next project take? (Hat tip to Coding Horror)
OTAPI Mavens – be sure to read Chris Hesik’s latest blog post on the updates in RAD Studio 2010.
Read Darren Kosinski on his improvements to the way the Code Editor handles Generics.
Malcolm Groves blogs about some one stuff in the RTL to handle files, paths, and directories.
Paul Krill has a story in InfoWorld about RAD Studio 2010.

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