Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #98
07
Jan
Jan
- Hey, look who are the stars of Dot Net Rocks this week! Me and marc!
- Want to get started with Prism? The Delphi Prism Primer is a good place to do that. Mega-kudos to Christian Stelzmann for writing this and to Mike Orriss for organizing it on the Wiki.
- Embarcadero Plus CodeGear Equals RAD Tools — We love getting the coverage, even if they did get the details about DataSnap wrong.
- I’ve always been a firm believer that you need to "walk the buffet before eating," but I bow to this guy for his clearly superior buffet skills.
- Will you be able to use Delphi Prism to write applications for the Google Android phone?
- Nice blog post about using closures/anonymous methods to do some multi-threading. And the comments lead to a nice little unit by Andreas Hausladen that lets you run arbitrary code in a separate thread.
- Boy, if this doesn’t sum up the Apple market in one neat little "news report", nothing does.
Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #97
29
Dec
Dec
- Marco Cantu and Cary Jensen are planning a series of Delphi Developer Days in the US. Should be great events, as both of these guys are experienced developers and presenters. Each event will be two intense days of training. Register in the next two days and get a pretty good discount.
- Delphi 2009 now has a Help Update. Dee can tell you more about it.
- I’m surprised it took this long. I haven’t even considered buying a desktop machine in years.
- TMS Software has a very nice new set of "smooth controls" for Delphi. Sweet.
- Jamie has some good tips on converting Delphi for .Net code to Delphi Prism.
Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #96
17
Dec
Dec
- Some folks have been asking questions about what the requirements are for posting comments on our blog server. John Kaster put together a nice article on it. Key point: All of our emails are opt-in. We don’t send you emails unless you specifically ask for them.
- From 16 December through the 15th of January, the FastReport guys are giving a 25% discount on all their products and licenses. Find out more at http://fast-report.com/en/new_year_discount.html.
- Could have easily been 50, but they made me stop at 10.
- What religion is Delphi?
- Oh, good grief. That is just terrible.
- I have a new email address: nick.hodges@embarcadero.com. The codegear.com address will still work for a while, but it will eventually stop working.
Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #95
15
Dec
Dec
- The Delphi Prism Reviewers Guide is now available.
- Also available: A Tour of Delphi 2009 - the latest in our White Paper series.
- I’m getting a lot of great feedback about CodeRage III — seems like it was a big success. David I, Anders Ohlsson, Andreano Lanusse, Christine Ellis, and all the presenters worked really hard and put on a pretty good show. So now that it is over, you can download and view the replays.
- Any of you Delphi guys interested in Ruby? If so, you might be interested to see that 3rdRail is now available for $99, and that Turbo Ruby is a new product available for $49. Find out more.
- Marc Hoffman and I did the .Net Rocks podcast this morning. It was fun to take the message of Delphi Prism into the hear of the .Net community. .Net Rocks has been around for a long time — pretty much since the beginning. I think I heard Carl and Richard say that we were show #403 or something in there. It was fun — but thanks goes out to Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell for having us. We are scheduled to be on 06 January, and I’ll be sure to let you know when it gets posted.
Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #94
08
Dec
Dec
- The Delphi Prism Command Line Edition download is now live at http://cc.codegear.com/Free.aspx?id=26256. It’s free as in beer.
- And be sure to get your RAD Studio 2009 Trial if you haven’t already had a look.
- Cross Platform Delphi is Back.
- Don’t miss our new white paper called "Using New Delphi Coding Styles and Architectures: A Review of the Language Features in Delphi 2009".
Delphi for PHP 2.0 Update 1
02
Dec
Dec
The Delphi for PHP train keeps rolling along!
First, if you haven’t been reading Jose’s blog, please do. He’s been doing some great blogging about some of the very interesting things you can do with Delphi for PHP and the VCL for PHP. It’s amazingly easy to take existing PHP libraries and wrap them up and use them in Delphi for PHP. For instance, he’s been doing just that in a series of articles about wrapping up Open Flash Chart. So now, adding Charting to your PHP application is only a few mouse clicks away. You can see the results in action as well.
Second, development continues apace. We’ve just released Update 1 to the already very solid and capable Delphi for PHP 2.0. You can download it from CodeCentral. Update 1 should take an already excellent product and make it even better.
If you haven’t given Delphi for PHP a look, you should. This is a seriously powerful PHP development tool.
Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #93
02
Dec
Dec
- CodeRage III is going like gangbusters. Have you signed up yet? It’s not too late — it will be going on all day. And to answer the inevitable question: Yes, all the sessions will be posted online for later viewing.
- The latest issue of Blaise Pascal Magazine — Issue #4 — is now available. If you aren’t a subscriber, you should be. This is a top-notch magazine with great writing.
- While we are talking publishing, Marco Cantu has published his new Delphi 2009 Handbook. And as usual, this 400 pages of Delphi goodness is available on Lulu.com. Thanks for the support Marco!
- And not to be outdone, Dr. Bob has published Delphi 2009 Essentials. And it looks like Dr. Bob is giving this title away for free in PDF form if you purchase some of his Delphi courseware. Nice!
- Hey, I have a new email address! nick.hodges@embarcadero.com. The old codegear.com address should continue to work, but at least now I can pass out my new business cards.
Toronto Delphi Users Group Meeting
02
Dec
Dec
Date : Monday, December 15, 2008
Time : 7:00 to 10:00 PM
Speaker : Tim Young of Elevate Software
Tim is the Principal Architect/Developer for Elevate Software, Inc
(www.elevatesoft.com ).
Topic : ElevateDB
Description : ElevateDB represents the next generation of database engines that they will be producing. He will discuss using ElevateDB with CodeGear RAD Studio 2009 as the primary development environment, and will be walking
everyone through a short example of how ElevateDB can be used with highly-distributed applications to provide solid, reliable, and fast database applications that reduce support inquiries related to configuration and distribution issues. As part of this, he will also be briefly covering the replication facilities that are part of the new ElevateDB 2.x, along with the multiple platform capabilities of ElevateDB.
Elevate Software, Inc. has been in business providing database engine software for developers since 1998. Their first product, DBISAM, was originally a VCL-only product for Delphi, but has been expanded over time to include C++Builder, Kylix, and ODBC.
Note : Refreshments will be served at the meeting. PLEASE INFORM ME IF YOU ARE COMING - dermontr@rogers.com
Location : North York Central Library, upstairs meeting room, 5120 Yonge Street (North York Centre Subway Stop)
Interesting Stuff about Delphi Prism
27
Nov
Nov
- First, in the coming months, we will be providing feature updates for Delphi Prism. This is a bit different from what we’ve done in the past. This means that there will be new features available for Delphi Prism between major releases. This means that if you buy RAD Studio with Software Assurance then you will be able to stay current with Delphi Prism. It also means that if you don’t, you won’t. This is the perfect time to add on Software Assurance when you upgrade. A roadmap of exactly what those features mean will be coming out very, very soon.
- Second, all the documentation for Delphi Prism will be wiki-based. We’ll be shipping a snapshot of the wiki with the product, and you will be able to take a snapshot of the current state of the wiki anytime you want. Currently, trusted community members can update the documentation, but we’ll be opening that up as things become more routine with the wiki documentation. We are pretty excited about this new way of delivering documentation and believe that it will result in a superior solution. This does mean that F1 help won’t be directly available (though we are working on that), but it does mean that the help can be updated and improved constantly and immediately. So if you have been asking for the opportunity to have our docs on a wiki, well, here’s your chance!
- Third: Delphi Prism and Delphi 2009 are different products and different languages that develop applications for different platforms. Therefore, the languages that the two products use will be different. There are cool features in one that aren’t in the other. Some of the cool features from one will end up in the other as both move forward. But each language will be developed and moved forward with their respective underlying frameworks in mind. We will, of course, be doing what we can to maintain compatibility and to make migration as easy as possible.
- Fourth: Silverlight support in Delphi Prism is a bit interesting. Silverlight is a bit of a moving target, with the official release of Silverlight 2.0 coming just a few short weeks ago. Currently, to develop for Silverlight, you need to download the Silverlight Visual Studio bits from Microsoft and install them into Visual Studio. However, the installer for those bits doesn’t recognize the VS Shell as being Visual Studio, so if you don’t have Visual Studio installed but do have Prism installed, the bits won’t install into Prism alone. We are working with Microsoft to resolve this issue, as we aren’t the only one’s who have noticed this anomaly.
- Did I mention that RAD Studio customers are really going to want to have Software Assurance?
- Fifth: Delphi Prism is hosted by the Visual Studio Shell. The key binding for Visual Studio are different. If you are interested in having the key binding for Visual Studio be more like the ones you are used to from the Galileo IDE, then you should download and install "DPack". It is a plugin to Visual Studio that make things work a lot like the Galileo IDE. You can link to it and other valuable downloads from our Recommended Downloads page.
- Sixth: Some of you might like a Crash Course in Delphi Prism.
Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #92
24
Nov
Nov
- Marco Cantu has written for us a nice white paper on Unicode and Delphi 2009. It is actually part of his forthcoming book Delphi 2009 Handbook. That book will be published on Lulu.com, and a PDF version will be available to registered users of RAD Studio 2009.
- Cool new IDE Expert for those of you doing Delphi Programming: IBrowser
- Chris Bensen and David Lock have done a cool example of Delphi programming and OpenGL and SDL (though I’m going to have to pester Chris to use CodeCentral for stuff like this).
- Have you been to Dr. Bob’s Store on Lulu?
- Jeff Dunetmann remembers Turbo Pascal 1.0. The thing than hooked him? It allowed him to be more productive by making mistakes faster. Interesting way to look at it. (And Jeff has a Lulu Store as well.)
Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #91
20
Nov
Nov
- Great answer from Bruce McGee. By the way, I love StackOverflow — very, very cool. And remember, you can view just only the stuff with the "delphi’ tag if you want. I note that our very own Barry Kelly has quite a bit of StackOverflow Reputation and frequently answers questions. Nice.
- Fun timewaster: Assembler — sadly there are only 18 levels, and Level 18 had me stumped for a while.
- David I has been running a fun series on memories about Turbo Pascal 1.0 now that it has been 25 years since it’s relase. And guess who showed up with some thoughts?
- Julian and DevExpress will be supporting Delphi Prism.
Delphi in a Unicode World
20
Nov
Nov
Here are thinks — all in one place — for my three part series on "Delphi in a Unicode World".
Delphi in a Unicode World Part II: New RTL Features and Classes to Support Unicode
Off Topic: Pandora, RIAA, and Buying Music
10
Nov
Nov
I’m a huge fan of Pandora. If you haven’t discovered it yet, Pandora is a music streaming service that has a terrific knack for playing music that you like. You can create stations simply be telling them one of your favorite artists, and then they start playing music from that artist, and then music similar to that artist, based on the input of other users. As they choose different songs for you, you can give them the thumbs up or the thumbs down, and the I have a great station based on the GooGooDolls, and something like 98% of the songs they play on that station I like. After a little tuning, I only very rarely give the thumbs down to a song they play for me.
The service is free, and I will occasionally try to click on some of their ads in support of the service. But maybe the best thing is the number of new artists that I’ve discovered. If not for Pandora, I’d have never heard of Colby Caillat or Sara Bareilles or Matt Nathanson. And because of Pandora, I’ve purchased many new CD’s that I otherwise would not have. The same thing happened to Julian Bucknall when he discovered Pandora.
Now, given the above, you’d think that the music industry would be delighted with Pandora. Sadly, the opposite is true. They are putting the thumbscrews to Pandora. Pandora is still on the air — I’m listening right now — and hopefully that will continue. I’m not familiar with all the details — I gather that they may be working this out so Pandora and other broadcasters can stay "on the air". I’m all for artists and the record companies getting paid, but it seems to me that this is another example of an "old economy" business not realizing how things work and how they can benefit from the "new economy".
Delphi 2009 Videos
03
Nov
Nov
Now that Update 1 is out, I’m sure a lot of you will be giving another look to Delphi 2009. We feel that the quality in Delphi 2009 was outstanding, and Update 1 merely raises the bar even further. And we aren’t done yet — the guys are still banging away at making Delphi 2009 the highest quality most powerful version of Delphi yet. Native code development is the heart of Delphi, and we continue to press forward to create the best RAD tools for developing native Windows code. We continue to focus on things like Delphi language features, IDE productivity, and of course, quality. Our commitment to Delphi for Win32 is very strong and critical to everything we are doing going forward. It’s never been a better time to be a Delphi developer. But hey, don’t take my word for it — you can hear it straight from some happy customers.
And as part of that, I wanted to remind you of the nice set of videos available about the new features and cool stuff in Delphi 2009 and C++Builder 2009. There are some great videos from R&D Engineers, us Product Managers, as well as other folks like some of our awesome QA folks. Lots of good content.
So, if you’ve been meaning to head over and give some of the videos a look, now is the time.
Delphi 2009 Update 1 is now live
31
Oct
Oct
Delphi 2009 Update 1 is now live. You can read about the update here in the Release Notes. You can look at the list of Quality Central reports fixed in this update.
If you have your IDE set to automatically check for updates, you should be notified, well, automatically. 
If you prefer to download it manually, you can go to the Registered Users page and get it there. Or you can just go right to CodeCentral and get it.
When you get done, your About Box should look something like this:
Delphi Prism News
29
Oct
Oct
- Sorry, somehow this got stuck in the Queue. Most of these links are a bit dated, but thought you’d like to see them anyway.
- I did a podcast for the folks over at Dr. Dobbs. Most of it was about Delphi Prism — the interviewer was pretty excited about it.
- While I was at PDC, Allen, marc hoffman, and I sat down with Jim McKeeth and had a chat about Delphi Prism and other stuff.
- Paul Krill has a write up about Prism in Infoworld,
- Delphi Prism gets a mention in this nice PDC summary.
- Sheila Molnar of WinDevPro covers Prism as well.
Delphi Prism
27
Oct
Oct
Today we announced Delphi Prism — our next generation Delphi development tool for the .Net platform. We have licensed the RemObjects Oxygene technology to create Delphi Prism. Delphi Prism is platform, stack, and database neutral. You can write code for the CLR almost anywhere it exists, including Mono for Linux and the Mac. In addition, we are including heterogeneous database access via dbExpress for ADO.NET. We have a dbExpress-based implementation for the ASP.NET Provider.
Already there are a lot of links available:
- You can read the press release here.
- You probably have a lot of questions, so check out the FAQ.
- Here’s an interview with marc hoffman of RemObjects about Prism.
- We are at PDC — so if you are here, stop by our booth at #916
We are really excited about Delphi Prism — a new product for .Net developers. Keep an eye out for more information in the coming weeks on pricing, roadmap, and other information about the product. Do read the FAQs — there are a lot of good answers there.
Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #90
24
Oct
Oct
- Up to #90 already. Anyone got any ideas for a special event for when I hit RTotPS #100?
- Next week at PDC, I’ll be doing my best to keep up on Twitter. So if you want to start following me, you can. We’ll see how it goes — hopefully, I won’t be so busy that I forget. ;-) Or better yet — hopefully the Internet connectivity won’t be so expensive that I can use it.
- Jan Goyvaerts has a great summary about strings and how to deal with them in Delphi 2009.
- Toon Krijthe has been working on a complete syntax description of the Delphi language.
Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #89
22
Oct
Oct
- Hey, I have a new goal: to get Delphi added to refactormycode.com. So I emailed the guy who runs the site, and he kindly responded with this:
I’m glad you like my site. Delphi is not currently supported by the tool I use for syntax highlighting (http://ultraviolet.rubyforge.org/). Only the syntax listed on http://refactormycode.com/help/code as supported atm.
If you can create a syntax for Delphi I might add it.
But I usually add language that is already used on the site but does not have a tab (language) yet. But I haven’t seen anyone requesting or using Delphi on the site.
So it sounds like some one out there that knows Ruby will need to write a syntax highlighter for Delphi and add it to that project. Anyone up for the job? And feel free to request that Delphi gets added to the site.
- David I will be in Frankfurt next week for EKON 12. So will Barry Kelly and Danny Magin. I’ve been the past three or four years, and always have a great time. However, this year I’m not going because I’ll be at PDC that week. Keep your eyes open for some interesting announcements from us during the conference.
- Speaking of PDC, I hear rumors of a Delphi flash mob at PDC — that sounds like a great idea to me. Let me know the details!
- From Jeff Duntemann: Amazing pictures of the sun.
Blaise Pascal Magazine
20
Oct
Oct
I have before me the latest copy of Blaise Pascal Magazine. The tagline reads:
All about Delphi and Kylix, Pascal and related languages.
In other words — my kind of magazine. And this issue, lie the previous two, is packed full of really, really good stuff. Just a sampling:
- Two articles by Julian Bucknall and Marco Cantu about TStream and its descendents. If you ever wanted to know about TStream and using streams, this is the place to go.
- Two great articles by Jeremy North — one about the new Ribbon controls (which he wrote, by the way, so he knows what he’s talking about) and another about an "expanding button" which grows when you mouse over it. Great stuff for you VCL developers.
- The usual great stuff from Dr. Bob and Hallvard Vassbotn as well as book reviews, more code, and tons of great information.
This is really a great effort and a great contribution to the community. You can support it by getting a subscription at http://www.blaisepascal.eu. I met Detlef Overbeek at SDC a couple of weeks ago, and he’s quite dedicated to supporting the Delphi/Pascal community, so please consider supporting his efforts with a subscription. I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of the fourth issue. Anyone doing Delphi Programming should be, too.
Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #88
15
Oct
Oct
- CodeRage is back!
- I assume that most of you read this blog because you are interested in Delphi Programming. And thus I am doing my part to make sure that Delphi programming gets the recognition it deserves — maybe even "Language of the Year".
- I’ve published my phone number before, but because of the migration to Embarcadero and what not, my extension will be changing. I’m always happy to talk to customers, so call me at 831-431-5165.
- Make sure that if you are at PDC at the end of the month that you stop by our booth.
Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #87
01
Oct
Oct
- The Delphi 2009 Reviewers Guide is now online.
- If you are having trouble accessing the newsgroups, do make sure you are pointing your newsreader to forums.codegear.com
- A lot of you Delphi guys use Interbase, and the Interbase 2009 team has released Hotfix 1.
- I mentioned this last time around, but there is a growing and active Delphi community over at stackoverflow.com. The site takes a bit of getting used to, but once you get the hang of it — and get your reputation up to a decent level — it’s a pretty cool place to get good answers to questions.
- My boss — "The wizard behind the curtain" — wrote an article for Dr. Dobbs Journal — Why Is Native Code Development Still Thriving?
- Ray of DevExpress is looking for feedback on their Delphi 2009 component sets.
Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #86
26
Sep
Sep
- And some people were saying that anonymous methods weren’t useful.
- Joe Stagner of Microsoft really likes Delphi for PHP. He says "[Delphi for PHP] 2.0 is the REAL DEAL and I LOVE IT !"
- Want to help spread the word about Delphi and C++Builder 2009? Here are some cool graphics and banner ads you can use if you want to.
Ready for Tiburon: DevExpress
25
Sep
Sep
Got the following email from DevExpress this morning:
You can now build Unicode applications using our VCL components in the recently released Delphi 2009.
This is a Beta release and we are actively asking for feedback from our Delphi customers so that we can address any issues and so we can provide better integration where necessary.
Great to see this popular tool vendor getting "Ready for Tiburon". I know that many of you rely on the great components from DevExpress, so this is good news indeed.
And of course, now is the time to buy.
People Like Delphi 2009
23
Sep
Sep
We put a lot of effort into Delphi 2009. A lot of hours were spent making sure the feature set was right, that the quality was up to the highest standards, and that it ran faster and performed better than ever. We think we’ve done a pretty good job with that. And so do a lot of our customers.
Customers from all types of Delphi shops — component vendors, ISVs, and corporate developers — seem to like Delphi 2009 pretty well. Just read the quotes. And those are real quotes, too, taken mostly from the newsgroups and emails we’ve gotten. People are pretty excited.
We believe that Delphi 2009 is the best Delphi ever. Lots of our customers agree. Maybe you should make it the current version of Delphi you are using.
