Starting work on MS Surface

As you might know I will start work on a MS Surface unit shortly. Now, I've come up with a couple of ideas to implement. Some are more obvious (photos from one of our projects presented on a map) but others are more intriguing (using the unit as an aid for biological determination work). I also want to do some work on a 'social networking' application which can be used by 'customers' to interact with each other, even when they are not in the same location.

However, a client of ours came up with another idea. This client works in the 'office cleaning business' and would like an application that will scan a map of a building and by adding information to the map (dragging people to rooms, coloring floors to indicate complexity) the application will calculate the price for cleaning that building.

So, I think that will be the first application I will be working on. I will keep you posted - for as far as the MS license agreements allow me to - about the progress.

Bye,

Bart

When to take matters in your own hands?

Some time ago I wrote about the poor support on a component that I'm using (ProfDHTMLEdit). For some time now, it seems the component (or the author) is dead and buried. I've given up hope for a D2009 version of the control any time in the future.

Now, for me that doesn't matter, since I won't be porting my software to D2009 after all (at least, that's the current thinking). But, what about the other customers? As you can read in the newsgroup the customers are getting more desperate and - if I were allowed to - I would like to help them.

So, what would my (legal) position be? I think I could offer my services as a consultant to an individual ProfDHTMLEdit user. No problems in hiring somebody that will do some work on a component that you purchased with the sources included I think. But, to most people that won't be an option, because it would become too expensive (the control itself only costs $100 or so).

Another matter would be if I would make a D2009 version of the component available for all to download. Let alone if I would sell it. I think there would be some legal problems if I did.

But, when would enough be enough? When would I (or anyone) be allowed to publish a new version of a control that no longer is supported? What are your thoughts?

Bye,

Bart

Starting to blog about my C# experiences

Regular visitors to my blog know that I have been working with Delphi for the last decade or so. The love between Delphi and I has grown, although my old love (just about everything that Microsoft did and does) never died out. At regular intervals I did some things with VB, C++, C#, ASP and ASP.Net.

For me, 2009 will be a year where I will say goodbye to Delphi (for new things that is) and will move to C# and .Net for all of our software. There is just too big a gap between development in the C#/.Net world and the Delphi world, despite the recent releases of Delphi 2009 and Prism. Of course, that's IMHO only, but in my company that's what counts.

So, I will be writing more and more about C# and not that much anymore about Delphi.

The first new product that we will do will be using the MS Surface unit, which will be installed in my office the first week of 2009. I can't wait to get going with that. I'll keep you posted (as far as I'm allowed by MS, because I'm bound to a pre release agreement for the MS Surface unit).

Bye,

Bart

Ps: From now on I will only tag postings that are about Delphi only with the Delphi tag. Other postings (not tagged Delphi) won't get picked up by delphifeeds.com, so if you want to stay in touch, please RSS subscribe or come back on a regular basis.

Twitter in outer space

I have fallen in love with Twitter. Somehow it's interesting to know what people are doing. I find myself simply picking random Twitterers to find out what they are up to. I also found it very entertaining to follow Stephen Fry on his trip to Madagascar.

Is it voyeurism? Yes, probably, though not in a sexual way :-) I mean, watching the Delphi Twitters arouses only the geekiest of geeks ;-)

I also found that the astronauts on the Endeavour are twittering. That reminded me of a project of many moons ago that I did for Nasa.

I developed an application that used an Apple portable computer and a pen table of some sort. A Hypercard stack contained a lot of information (images, text, maps, et cetera). We developed a nice little application to browse that information. The table was used to draw something on top of the pages displayed.

Now, the fun thing was that there was one portable in the space shuttle and one on the ground. Whatever page was navigated to on either end, the others got to see too. And whatever was drawn on top of that page was shown on the other end too.

This helped communication between the astronauts and the ground people in explaining what to do at certain times. People on the ground would simply find a photo of the door to open and mark an X next to the lever to pull.

As someone that only failed to make a pilot due to a stupid motor cycle accident, you can understand that this little project (it wasn't that hard to do) is one of the dearest to me. I even got some memorabilia sent to me when that flight was over.

So, every time I see a little twitter from outer space, I think back to the time when I was still hacking my way through Hypercard. Sometimes it's fun being the older guy in the room :-)

Bye,

Bart

Now, who would be the best Delphi programmer?

Would that be Obama, or would it be McCain? I think Nader, as an independent, would be the best choice.

Ok, so I’ve got to make this a more interesting posting. Here goes one attempt.

If you would go for McCain, you’ve got an oldy with a lot of experience (much like myself I might add). You would probably get an excellent programmer, but not going beyond the possibilities of the VCL. He would stick to the VCL, maybe buy a component pack or two, but the single EXE would be his target. He’s heard of webservices and code injection, but doesn’t really know what it means. He just manages to get a setup program out (of course using Installshield, not writing something himself). The freakiest thing he does, is implement skinning using DevExpress.

Now, when you look at Obama, he probably would write his own VCL components from scratch. While programming he would have a couple of visions in sight. The client should be satisfied, but maybe the components are good enough to sell later on to another client. He’d keep his eyes open to other platforms all the time, but would stick to Delphi as his primary development tool. Unless, there is some major upset. Then, after careful deliberation, he would drop Delphi. The first attempt will be with a couple of softening arguments, but when there is another upset, it’s out with the tool all together. The end result would be a set of well designed components, all working together on various levels. Of course, one component can crash, but that’s all part of the development strategy. The one that crashes, is out of the door and the next one can be developed.

And Nader? Well, of course he would stick to using Smalltalk. All very well designed, but commercially not very viable.

So, go for it. Where do I go wrong? Make my day!

Bye,
Bart

(just a day off, as you probably can tell :-)

Passion for Research

I’ve been blogging about the Microsoft PDC the last week and, although it strictly didn’t have anything to do with the Delphi community, I still think it is interesting to know what happened there. I will do one last summing up tomorrow on the event, but there was one presentation I would like to highlight.

I attended the talk on the WorldWideTelescope Research project. I had installed the software earlier and was really amazed at its quality. At the presentation I found out that it basically was a one man project by a guy named Jonathan Fay. I didn’t know that before and my respect goes out to that guy. I regard myself as a pretty good programmer, but what he has come up with is out of my league. So, respect to you Jonathan.

You can watch the presentation at http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC48/. And, if you think of killing the video after a couple of minutes of watching, at least skip through to about 27 minutes and watch him talk about a presentation by a 6 year old kid, all done with his software. The passion that Jonathan shows after that really sums it up. That moment made this presentation the highlight of the conference to me.

Bye,

Bart

DevExpress will have a localizer tool

The TcxLocalizer component helps you localize those of your applications that use our controls, as well as third-party or standard controls. This component provides centralized control over an application’s UI language or locale. Using this component, switching to another locale is as simple as changing a single option.

http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/ctodx/archive/2008/10/31/vcl-subscription-new-localization-tool-coming-in-next-build.aspx

Things that make you go humble – update

Please go to the blog again to see two videos on SecondLight and on Boku. Really worth the time they take.

Things that make you go very humble

Bye,

Bart

Things that make you go very humble

Todays keynote was exceptional. The topics were coming from Microsoft Research and although the first half hour or so was full of stuff mentioning how important Microsoft Research is to Microsoft and to the world, the remainder of the presentation was unbelievable good.

Sorry about the lack of pictures and videos this time; I didn’t have the camera ready. Sorry. The most cool stuff is at the end of the article so keep reading.

Keep reading to read about SecondLight

There was a talk about how MSR works in the field of medicine, helping researchers analyzing fast amounts of data. And although you really got the point that Microsoft’s technology is helping in that field, it didn’t feel really special.

There also was a talk about very tiny measuring devices for temperature and humidity and things like that, that are actually installed at the convention centre. The devices itself use about 4K of memory (remember that from the old days?) and only have a circuit board that’s the size of a quarter coin. It has a radio transmitter and, to give you a sense of things, there are about 100 of those sensors installed in the main hall. Microsoft has gathered the data about temperature and such during the last couple of days and presents the (vast amount of) data in nice graphical form. It really showed how the cooling system works and what the impact of the equipment, audience, and the cooling system is to the conditions in the hall.

Next, a new programming language for kids, called Boku, was shown. It uses a XBox console to let kids program a ‘games world’ and do really fantastic cool stuff using iconized commands. The speaker spoke quicker than a rapid firing machine gun, but what he showed was really AWESOME and I want one of those for my kids! This will be a very good reason for me to by an XBox (not quite sure if it was a PC or XBox that was used). Go look up the videos on Boku that are probably out there. It really was amazing to watch.

But, the real highlight of the key note was the stuff on what Microsoft calls SecondLight. Really DO GO find videos on that. It comes down to this. It uses a special kind of LCD and infrared cameras. The LCD can be made transparent by applying some kind of current to the screen.The effect is that the LCD will not only display the images as you know, but also lets a second image go through, to be projected on a simple piece of paper. And the fun thing is: this second image can be totally different from the image that is shown on the LCD. The effect is that you can display secondary information about (pieces of) the image on the primary LCD. (Side note: I just hear a fellow programmer calling home about this and he calls it “Freaking Cool”). You can hold a piece of simple paper just above the screen and show some detail information about the stuff that’s under that.

I find it hard to express in words, but really, really, go find videos and other information on this. It is freaking cool.

It really made me ponder about my own work. What a amazing boring job I have! I want to be working for Microsoft Research!

Bye,

Bart

Windows 7 installed

I installed the pre-beta Windows 7 that we got. About the Windows 7 client itself: it looks a lot like Vista but has a couple of nice new things. You will find others blogging about all the new things found in there, so I won’t.

But, here’s a little tip. It runs excellently in a Sun’s VirtualBox box. Just point to http://www.virtualbox.org to get your copy and try it. I got it up and running within the hour without a hitch and that’s on a good but not very modern portable. VirtualBox feels a lot faster than Virtual PC. I will need Virtual PC though, because the Visual Studio 2010 copy that we got is made available as a VirtualPC image.

The goodies are delivered on a very nice and small 150Gb hard disk that I probably keep using because of its physical size. It’s nice and small yet very useful.

I also got to shake hands finally with Nick Hodges, Allen Bauer, Marc Hoffman and Jim McKeeth. My Dutch accent prevents me from taking part in the little interview that Jim did (I’m just too embarrassed), but I will definitely listen to it when it’s online.

We are getting ready to go to the party at the universal Studios now. And some people were already getting ready for that :-)

Bye,

Bart

Presentation on Azure/Live/Mesh on the PDC

I just watch a presentation on the PDC on MS Azure and Windows Live by Chris Anderson and Don Box. These guys had a great presentation prepared and it was pretty fun to watch. They showed a bunch of great techniques and demo-ed how Azure will host your stuff (applications and data alike). They also showed how easy it is to get something going with techniques and languages that we already know like C#, LinQ, et cetera. In my mind it shows the counter part to the Google Apps platform (and probably beyond that).

However, they hardly got any applause which I think was very funny in itself. Although the stuff they showed was excellent and pretty ground breaking. Now, why didn’t they got the applause that they were quite obviously expecting?

A couple of reasons are possible:

1. The audience didn’t get it. Nah, there are a couple of thousand developers in the audience and probably all very smart programming on a day to day basis. That can’t be it.
2. The stuff isn’t that special and people thinking: what’s so special about that? That can be it, but that would probably because the stuff is so easy to do. From within Visual Studio and with a couple of easy mouse clicks you can deploy your software out there and the same goes for your data.
3. Now, the third reason might be it (and it is the reason why I didn’t clap my hands a lot). This is ground breaking stuff that gives companies and developers a lot of power to create new solutions quickly and much faster than before. But, would you trust your applications and data in the hands of Microsoft?

I think that for applications that provide public services, like route finding applications, this all is great stuff. You can very quickly create your app, deploy it out there in the cloud for others to use. However for you business application you would like to keep your stuff on your own machines.

Now, what was shown in the demo, and maybe wasn’t emphasized enough, is the lack of needing to know where stuff is. It might be in the clouds or on your own machines, it might be in an Azure SQL Server database or in your own: it doesn’t matter. Simply by changing a root URI you can use the stuff from where ever it is.

So far I think Azure and the like is great stuff and I will certainly be thinking on how to use it. It is just not clear to me yet how I can use it in our software (which creates documentation solutions). But, maybe I should give myself a bit of time to think about that.

Bye,

Bart

Summary of my first day at the PDC

After a wonderful Sunday at Venice beach, having a beer and fish and chips at a Irish pub, the jet lag hit us and we had a hard time staying awake. It made us miss one of the parties of the PDC, but after all, we are here for work, aren’t we?

So this morning we got up at 6:30 AM but still didn’t make it to the start of the key note speech on Monday. But, when we got there, I felt we hadn’t missed much. Key note speeches don’t make a successful conference. We sat it out, but next time, I will leave early if the speeches are that boring.

I attended a (what turned out to be) basic demonstration of Sharepoint and having learned my lesson at the key note speech I did leave that early this time.

I visited the CodeGear booth, got a t-shirt, and was told the Prism DVD doesn’t have anything that I don’t already have. I got to speak to my family using Skype (which was a first to me) and was able to kiss my son to sleep which was a great bonus.

I had a chance to catch up with the ‘Partner manager’ for MS Surface and later attended a presentation on MS Surface. And to me, that was the absolute top of the Monday. The presentation was pretty funny, and the stuff the guys showed was really awesome. If you never had your hands on a MS Surface table: try to do so. It’s a fun and exciting experience.

The presentation showed what Microsoft has done to make the life of the developer easier and it appears they have done an excellent job on that. It is amazing to see how good the assembly for using the MS Surface library matches the things you know already about programming in the modern MS languages. It’s looks to be very easy to sit down and write your first Surface program.

And if you were there, you will get the Surface SDK and you can do so. And I for one will definitely will, because I have some great ideas for it. I will also try to use it from Prism (no reason why we couldn’t). I will let you know the results when doing so…

Bye,

Bart

Visiting the Microsoft PDC

We've just decided that I will be visiting the Microsoft PDC. That is, if there are any tickets, hotels and flights still available :-

I'm sure I will have a peep at the place where Prism will be available. Since I am always on the look out for new technology, and looking for opportunities to move our software to the .Net platform, I will definitely want to have a look at Codegear's product in that market. I really hope to get my hands on a trial version and/or have a close look to see why I would choose for Prism and not for C#.

Also, I'm pretty interested in Windows 7. So, that I will give that a close look too (and maybe even try our software on it).

If any of you want to schedule a meeting or demo of our Sevensteps Studio product or any other Sevensteps software product, please let me know and we'll schedule a meeting. I'm always on the look out for new business partners to setup a new product. If you want to get first hand knowledge about what our software can do for you, this might be a right time.

Cu in LA.

Bye,
Bart

DevExpress releases beta for controls supporting D2009

Well, I just got that email that I was waiting for. DevExpress has its first (beta) release out supporting D2009. I now have placed my order for D2009. I hope everything works out as smooth as you read out elsewhere. And it looks like I can finally get my feet wet with regards to the anonymous methods, so I will know better what I’m talking and complaining about.

When I’ve set everything up I will definitely publish my experiences…

Bye,

Bart

Proof of the concept is in the eating...

Marco published a little example of anonymous methods. I already commented about it on his blog, but to me this is the very proof of the uglyness of anonymous methods.

To me the beauty in object oriented languages is the ability to create easy readable code if you take care of your object design and naming conventions. If you have a sound object model and you choose the names of properties and methods wisely, your code will be very easy to read and to understand. If you keep you code logic simple and short (I very much favor methods and functions that have a very limited amount of code in them) no one will have trouble reading (and if necessary maintaining) your code.

Marco's example, to me, proofs that anonymous methods are terrible. One has to read his little piece of code a couple of times to see what's going on and still it would probably need a bit of documentation. Or, maybe it's me, and only I have to read his code a couple of times.

In my book the anonymous methods will remain very much what their name suggests: not very well known.

Bye,
Bart

AutomatedQA know their support

Some time ago I reported serious problems that prevented me from compiling my projects using AutomatedBuildStudio from Automated QA. I already had some support emails going back and forth but the solutions was nowhere near.

So, I decided to switch to FinalBuilder and installed the trial version. That was a good experience and it got me going with my projects in a half a day.

I still was in contact with AutomatedQA though and they asked an opportunity to try to solve the problem. I gave them the length of the trial period of FinalBuilder (which is a month). To make a long story short: I ended up letting an AutomatedQA programmer take over my developers computer (using the ever excellent TeamViewer) and after an hour or so fiddling with configuration files, temporary files during the build, et cetera, they concluded to have found an offending compiler setting generating during the build process.

They promissed a solution by the next day and they delivered that. Compiling my projects works fine again.

That makes me happy for a couple of things:
1) Apparently the problems of a single use does mean a thing to AutomatedQA. They could have said: sorry we lost you, but there's nothing we can do. They didn't do that and really digged in.
2) I discovered a problem with FinalBuilder and Wise v6 in creating installer packages. After a compilation of the Wise package from Finaler Builder, the Wise project is damaged and from that point on unusable. I had to compiling my packages 'by hand' which was pretty unconvenient. I'm sure I would have found some sort of automated build process if I had to stick with FinalBuilder, but it wasn't as problem free as I first thought.

Most important of all, I can still use my original build scripts, which are pretty advanced and saved me a lot of time in the past and now probably will do in the future.

Just to let you know and to do justice to the support team of AutomatedQA. It just tells me again that having great support pays off in the end to both parties.

Bye,
Bart

To further on all the non(sense) news about Tiburon...

I may be too sceptical, under too much work stress, or maybe I'm catching some flew or the other. But really, is the news about the handling of a password character worth the bits over the internet? (oops, now I've done it myself).

See: http://glooscapsoftware.blogspot.com/2008/08/delphi-2009-passwordchar.html

Come on everybody out there. I love to read about generics and implementation (problems) with the Unicode stuff. I even find the reports about the installation time more worthwhile than this.

It's probably me... Lunch time is over: back to business!

Bye,
Bart

So, installation time is shorter. Who cares????

I've now seen a couple of blogs about the improved install speed of the new Delphi version. It may be me, but I really don't get it why people get so enthousiastic about that. Who cares if your installation takes 10, 20 or 60 minutes? It's something that you (should) do only once in a long while and then you're done with that. I much rather see 10% improvement in compile speed than 1000% improvement in installation time.

Am I crazy or what? Let's state it once again and never mention it after this:

installation time of Delphi 2009 has improved!

(now, back to work...)

Bye,
Bart

Would you buy Delphi 2009?

Now the new version is in the open I found me talking to myself yesterday (...) about when and why I should buy the new version. I am curious enough to want to get my hands on it, but really haven't found an argument for upgrading yet. The new features in the language are not the ones that will solve all my remaining whishes for my software. I am using DevExpress components and not using ribbon toolbars (yet), so there's not a lot of new things in the VCL for me.

I do want unicode though, badly, so that is a good reason. But I'm using the DevExpress components so I need to wait for those to be 2009-ready. So, I have decided to wait for them to come with a unicode compatible release of their components before buying 2009. Since everybody says that implementing unicode with 2009 is so easy, it shouldn't take long, but I'm not really sure about that to be honest. We'll see...

What about you? Can you control yourself and find a decent reason to upgrade? Or are you susceptible for the hype-like messages about 2009 and find you running to the shop already?

Bye,
Bart

Exceptions, return value checking, pre- and postconditions

I never actually worked with Eiffel but when I first heard about it (that is some decades ago, really...) there is one concept that I remembered for the whole of my professional career and I adhered as a 'coding principle' in my own code. I'm talking about the concept of pre- and postconditions.

As I remember it in Eiffel you can write your method/function/procedure (whatever it's called) and define some conditions that must be met before and at the end of that. E.g. you could define a precondition for a function that will ensure that a passed parameter is larger than zero. For the remainder of your code you can assume that the passed parameter IS larger than zero.

Now, whenever I write a function/method I do the same. E.g. if I do a typecast somewhere in my code, I try to check for the correctness of the object that is typecast as soon as possible in my code. Something like this (from the top of my head, forgive me typos, simplicity of the examples and such):

procedure Foo(const aControl: TWinControl);
begin
// Beginning of preconditions
if not Assigned(aControl) then exit;
if not (aControl is TEdit) then exit;
// End of preconditions

// You can now safely execute the code below
TEdit(aControl).Text := 'foo';
end;

The above works fine if there actually is something that you can check at the beginning of the code. But, what if you cannot, until right before you start to use an object? Like below:

procedure Foo();
var
aControl: TEdit;
begin
(**
A Whole Bunch of Code Here
**)
aControl := MyFunctionSomeWhereThatReturnsTEdit();
if (not Assigned(aControl)) then exit;
if (not (aControl is TEdit)) then exit;
aControl.Text := 'foo';
end;

In this case you would add your check just below the aControl := line. And if you have a lot of those, your code can become complex and hard to read. And you would end up with a lot of not so interesting code which in the end doesn't really matter to your program.

Now, until now I used assertions for this type of checking, mainly because you can turn those off easily using a compiler switch.

aControl := MyFunctionSomeWhereThatReturnsTEdit();
Assert(Assigned(aControl));
Assert(aControl is TEdit);

But, of course, this doesn't work if the 'failing conditions' might be ligitimate circumstances in your code. So, for those types of checks I used the if..then constructions from the first example.

But, I am now thinking that I'd better use exceptions for this. Currenlty I only use exceptions for 'error circumstances' and never really used them as a way to signal pre- and postconditions. It would go like this:

procedure Foo();
var
aControl: TEdit;
begin
try
(**
A Whole Bunch of Code Here
**)
aControl := MyFunctionSomeWhereThatReturnsTEdit();
aControl.Text := 'foo';
except
on E: MyConditionException do
begin
// This will be an exception raised from within MyFunctionSomeWhereThatReturnsTEdit
end;
on E: Exception do // There probably are seperate exceptions for nil and class type mismatch exceptions, but this will do for the example
begin
// Something else should be done.
end;
end;
end;

This will work (and I think I will give it a go in some small program to see if it works our for my style of programming), but I'd much rather see the concept of pre- and postconditions introduced in Delphi.

What do you think? If..Then constructions at the beginning? Exceptions? Push Embarcadero for pre-/postconditions? Something else?

Please let me know; I'm really curious.

Bye,
Bart

FinalBuilder it is...

As reported yesterday I was experiencing problems with AutomatedBuildStudio. With a little pain in my heart, but in the end with great relief I can tell you that I decided to switch to FinalBuilder.

The pain is caused by the memory of some great experiences with ABS. So I feel a little sad to leave them. But, to my joy I was up and running (for the project that gave me problems for the last week) in about 10 minutes (really!) time with FinalBuilder. I can't tell yet if it's quicker/better/easier to use than ABS, but the fact is that I now have an automated build script for one of my main products in just a couple of minutes time. With almost all the things in there that I want (I will have to tweak it here and there to do some script based automated things).

So, yes, it's a joy to say: I'm in the FinalBuilder camp too.

Thanks to everyone responding to my previous post about this. It really helped to make the decision to move over.

Bye,
Bart

Thinking about switching from Automated Build Studio to FinalBuilder

Some time ago I purchased an update to Automated Build Studio. I whish I never did. I was pretty happy with the previous version, but encountered a problem (or wanted a feature - can't remember) that was solved/available in the new version only. Since I was very happy in the past I never thought twice about purchasing the update.
From the word go I ran into problems. I got access violations and had problems with search paths that were used when compiling Delphi software. It took me some intensive emaling with the support department before I got our most important projects compiling again. The access violations still happen intermittedly and a solution was never provided.
Now, I started using a new component pack some time ago (VideoLabs) and the problems with the search paths were back again. Things compile fine using the IDE or from the command line, but using AutomatedBuildStudio I get some unexplainable errors. I emailed support a couple of time, but they all seem to be on holiday: I can't get a reply.

So, I'm thinking about switching to another tool. Even though I have created a workaround (calling a batch file compiling the projects, using another tool to update the version numbers of my software), I don't want that as a permanent solution on my build system.

I found quite a lot of praize about FinalBuilder. It seems pretty affordable too (maybe there's even a competetive upgrade prize available if I ask).

What's your experience? What build systems can you recommend?

Thanks for letting me know.

Bye,
Bart

I now get anonymous methods: but I really dislike them already...

The example below was taken from Andreano Lanusse's blog on anonymous methods.




After examining this example for a couple of minutes (yes, really it took me that long...) and looking at the other example in his blog, I think I've made my mind up. I detest anonymous methods already. IMHO (of course as always), I can only conclude that using anonymous methods make your code less readable (to me at least) and don't add any real value to the language. Still, I haven't found examples or explanations that help me to get into the anonymous camp. Even Craig Stuntz's doesn't help me get there.

I also realize that there is one principle that I live by that renders some of the 'advantages' of anonymous methods useless. Sure, using anonymous methods can help you to limit the amount of 'real' code in a method and thus make it a bit more easy to overview. Or, at least, that's one of the reasons give to use anonymous methods.

However, this 'advantage' is only of use if you write really long methods and functions. The more code you have, the sooner you will find yourself repeating things and the quicker an anonymous method can help you reduce your code. But, if I look at my own coding style, I try to make small methods and functions, archieving only a couple of things in it. That hardly ever takes more than 10-20 lines of code per method. If you are writing longer code, chances are that you better start that refactoring utility and split your code up. Most of times that will make your code better reusable and easier to maintain.

As for Craig's argument of being able to do things that a designer of a framework didn't think of: I think you are working against the principles in that framework or the framework simply is not well designed. But, that's maybe another personal style of programming. If I use somebody else's framework, I try to use it as intended. Maybe the 'hacking' you are talking about becomes a bit easier, but I for one are against hacking.

The last sentence reminds me: due to some technical problems, you might have missed my posting on why a developer wants to be a CIO (or not). If you are border tonight, you might want to have a peek.

Bye,

Bart

Why would developers want to become a CIO?

I found these articles today:


5 Reasons why a developer would want to become a CIO

and

8 Reasons why a developer would never want to become a CIO


They are about reasons why a developer might want to or might not change his position for a position as a CIO.

Now, I'm going to discard all the financial arguments. I'm not interested in money, at least not to the level that it will make me decide in favor of or against a job. Maybe it's because I'm Dutch and not American, I don't know. But I couldn't look at myself in the mirror if I would take a job just for the money. I would deny a job if they wouldn't pay what I'm worth though, but I think that's another matter. Bottom line: money couldn't get me into a job, but could keep me out of it.

Now, for the other reasons that a developer would want to be a CIO (only 2 of the 5 arguments remain after removing the financial reasons...) #2 is bullocks. It tells us that you want to be king of the company because you will have power over the people. To me, that's not a reason to be the king. I want to have the power over the faith of the software, not the people. I want to be able to tell which directions we need to take with the software. That's the real beauty of being king, not that you can tell people they need to fill in form A,B, or C.

Reason #5 (you get tired of solving the bugs) is bollocks too. Every programmer knows solving bugs is part of the job and you want to improve your software each day to give your customers a better product and toe get you less bugs on your todo list. If you are solving bugs each and every day and nothing but bugs, you're a bad programmer and you won't survive the business. If you have to do that because you're the bug solving programmer, you probably are just starting (solving bugs is a great way to learn the software and learn programming) and chances are you're not CIO material yet.

So, a nice article that draws some attention but, IMHO of course, full of nonsens.

As for the other article: the 8 reasons why you DON'T want to be the CIO, it's much the same.

Reason #1: we live to write code. True, but I guess that CIOs that have a developer background still continue to write code, or at least will research (new) code developments. You will be the senior in the company (after all, you started as a developer) and chances are there will be some hungry young dogs trying to learn from you. You won't leave your code: you only get to pick the nice pieces to be involved in.

Reason #2: seeing the fruits of your labor. Being a CIO for once you can make the decisions that you think are good for the software and the company. If you have sound ideas, the company will improve with your leadership and you will see the best measurable results possible: an increase in turnover. The results of a days work as a programmer is a nice piece of code that makes it through the unit test cleanly. The results as a CIO will show in the daily sales of licenses and positive customer feedback. I'd rather have the latter.

Reason #3: being able to speak Java/C/et cetera is a must for a CIO. That's the only way you won't get fooled by the developers that tell you that something isn't possible (anything is!). But, sure, you need to be able to express yourself as a human too, but I require that from my programmers too! If you can't talk Dutch (or English :-)) you would have a hard time surviving in my company. It's not a CIO-only requirement: it's a human's requirement to be able to express yourself.

Reason #4: there probably are a couple of people that want to be remembered for their hacking capabilities. But, again IMHO, hacking is stupid. If you are such a good programmer that you can do some facinating stuff, apply your abilities to do some good and useful work. It's a waste to spend your talents at stuff that gets people mad. You can do a lot better in making people happy.

Reason #5: sucking up to other people with jobs beginning with C's. What nonsense. If you are a good CIO, you will be taken as an equal amongst those C's. If you're not, you're not in a technology company and/or you're no good. If you find yourself sucking up the whole time you probably did it before (and you might even have gotten the C-job for it), but you won't make it.

Reason #6: the reference in the article to point #1 is a good one, because the same counter arguments apply. As the CIO you for once get to pick the directions and you will be able to do some real innovation that has an impact in the company. As a developer you will find you write just a bit more clever code that nobody will see. You'll take pride in that, but it will only matter to yourself.

Reason #7: not liking Powerpoint. If so, use something else: easy. Use video, music, exotic dansers. You're the guy with the 'C': pick your own tools. Now you can!

And for reason #8: that will all change, once YOU are the CIO. All the other developers will think: thank god, we now DO HAVE somebody that has a clue.

Again, Just My 2Cents Worth.

Bye,
Bart

I don't get anonymous methods...

Today I watched a presentation by Adreano Lanusse and David I on Tiburon. Nothing really new was shown from the things we already know. Luckily there were a couple of exceptions showing up as my installation does from time to time :-) And I now know that showing recorded videos using Microsoft Live Meeting is not a very good idea. The upload speed of the host was just not good enough. The rest of the presentation was pretty good to watch.

During the presentation we could ask questions and mine was: what's up with anonymous methods?

We've probably all seen the example of anonymous methods shown at http://blogs.codegear.com/davidi/2008/07/23/38915.

I just don't get why you want to use anonymous methods and I'm afraid Adreano and David were not able to explain it to me.

Why wouldn't you use a private class method? Or an local procedure? I really tried but I can't think of a situation where you want to use an anonymous method.

Who can explain this to my satisfaction? Why would I be happy with those???

Bye,
Bart

What are those prizes in the race - (part of) part 3

You might be wondering what's keeping part 3 of the reviews on the prizes in the race. To be honest: I started looking at RemObjects'  DataAbstract but business has kept me from looking at the software properly. It's not your daily component pack that your can write a quick review about. It's a proper software framework that needs a good looking at before coming up with an impression. So, please bear with me, the review will come, but it may take me a bit of time.

Bye,

Bart

Impressions from the webcast by Embarcadero

Yesterday I attended (half of) a webcast by Embarcadero presenting their products. Everytime I attend such a webcast I am amazed that it actually works. LiveMeeting (and all their competitors for that matter) really work and help to do a presentation from a distance. 

But, the presentation itself gave me some strange feelings. I must tell you that I am probably not in the target group of Embarcadero of their ' original'  products. I only have one database to maintain (the one that is used by Sevensteps' software) and that is not a complex one at all. That's also why I only saw half of the presentation: I realized that I probably won't use their products and will look at the Tiburon presentation later today. That's more my cup of tea.

There's another thing that I noticed in the presentation: the user interfaces that I saw were terrible! I saw an enormous amount of cluttered screens, about a trillion buttons in toolbars, 'old fashioned' icons and very complex dialogs. There was one tabbed dialog that had about 20 pages with numerous controls on each page. There were also wizards that help you do some complex work, but the wizards themselves were very complex and did not have a clear and clean design.

I probably understand were that's coming from. From what I saw the software can do a lot of complex tasks for you and you can pick from a large range of database (formats) to choose from. That probably is the reason why the user interface is so complex: there is a lot to do on a lot of database formats.

If I were to redesign the user interface I would start with one option screen where you can pick the database formats that your are interested in. Probably there's only one or two formats that you will be working on (in that session). Based on that choice I guess you can lose half of the buttons, options and windows

Also, in a dialog or wizard, when an page is not available due to previously made decisions: hide the page, don't just make it disabled. It will clean up the windows a lot and will make the software a bit easier to use. There was a wizard with a couple of tabbed pages which only had one active page of the 10 available. That's not a good design. If you only have one page available: lose the tab. There is no point in showing the other, disabled tabs.

That's just my 2 cents worth for now. I only hope that we get better user interfaces in Tiburon...

Bye,

Bart

And the winner is: Werewolf

The results are final. Werewolf, our superfast, late entry, has just won the race by a couple of votes from Jan Wicher. Werewolf, Jan and third place Tom Glenn will pick their prizes from the prizes made available by our sponsors.

First and second prizes were won with Delphi programs. Third place Tom Glenn made a fine contribution using C#.

Congratulations to them and thanks a lot to the contenders that didn't win a prize. To me, it was a lot of fun to be involved in this, albeit not as a contender. Who know, this might become an anual event. I will keep the website alive for the next year or so.

Bye for now,
Bart

Two days of voting left...

It is becoming a very tight race. There are three contenders for first place and the are only seperated by a couple of cotes. If you want to be the deciding vote, go to the site now and pick your winner.

Bye,
Bart

Races within the race

Now the voting has started for the winner of the Darwin Race of Languages the favorites are seperating from the pack. Two contenders are battling it out for the first two places and two others are fighting for third place. As you may know, there are three prizes to win, so there will be a couple of disappointments I'm afraid.

You can still have your say about the entries and make a difference for the contenders, so go the the website, try the published programs and vote the winner. The published programs are all well worth looking at and you might even find them usefull. I know I have one of them as a startup utility installed already - I will tell you which when the race is over :-)

Bye,
Bart

You can now vote for the winner of the race...

The results are in and you can now vote the winner in the Darwin Race of Languages competition. Seven of the participants entered a solution to one of the three problems and I think they are all worth examining. There are some very usefull utilities to be found there.

Go to the website and check out what the participants did and how they did it. On 30 July the winners to the competition will be announced and prizes will be handed over.

Bye,
Bart

Hans Starborg submits his entry

As time is running out for the race - there is only one day of programming left - Hans Starborg has published his results. All the results must be in by the end of tomorrow. From Wednesday on the audience can vote for the winners in the race. If you like you can already check some of the entries out.

Bye,
Bart

Late entry Werewolf publishes his solution too...

Well, the guys are not holding back. Werewolf, although a late entry only entering a couple of days ago, already submitted his solution for a GUI to a command line utility. He also added his documentation on the project.

Go check his work out.

Bye,
Bart

The first multi clipboard utility is in...

Yogi Yang was the first to come up with a result in the Darwin Race of Languages. He used Visual Basic to implement a multi clipboard utility that you can go and check out from the darwin site. IMHO I think this is a very usefull implementation. Go and check it out. In a weeks time the results of the others are in and you get the chance of voting for the winner in the race.

Yogi is till thinking about making the sources available, but for now you can go and have a look at the end result.

Bye,
Bart

What are those prizes in the race? - Part 2

Next up in the list of pizes for the race to be evaluated is SmartInspect. I must be honest here: I'm a CodeSite user and quite satisfied. My evaluation will inevatably be influenced by my CodeSite experiences and there will be a couple of comparisions. This is my second easiest evaluation because I already know the concepts from CodeSite.

Installing
Installing was like it should be: no hassle and flawless. SmartInspect can be used in Delphi, Visual Studio and Java. I've only looked at the Delphi implementation: I guess VS and Java implementations will be compareble.

Using SmartInspect
Basically SmartInspect is an advanced logging tool. You start a session, send out information and that is caught by either a server, a file or in memory. When logging to a server (which is built in into the viewer) the logging information is displayed live while running your program. When logging to a file, you can later view the file with a viewer.

You can of course log a simple string, but more usefull things can be done. You can log objects, the properties of which are available in the viewer. You can log images, stacks traces, system memory information, a screendump of the current window or the desktop window. There's a lot too choose from.

For more advanced debugging tracing methods/functions can be quite helpfull. Now, it basically is a minor thing, but I found the TrackMethod statements vary valuable. The working is comparable to the EnterMethod/LeaveMethod combination. But, EnterMethod/LeaveMethod must be used in pairs. And that means you best add a try/finally construction to your code to make sure the LeaveMethod is executed alwas.

TrackMethod however works with an interface and relies on the reference counting of the interface. This means you only need to add one call at the beginning of amethod/function to track it. There's no need for the try/finally construction. To me, that is a good thing because it won't clutter the readabilty of your code as much. Nice.

The console
Until now CodeSite and SmartInspect are about equal. The only real difference I found was the TrackMethods in SmartInspect, but CodeSite has functionallity to log to the windows event logs. So, the scores are equal at half time. But the real difference is in the console. While the CodeSite viewer isn't bad at all and gives you good possibilities to view and filter log messages, I think SmartInspect wins on points in that department. You have various viewers (a watch pane, some detail panes) for information from you log file. There's plenty to filter and various ways of finding specific information in your log file.

Conclusion
SmartInspect is just a very good product. From experience I can tell you that having these kinds of logging capabilities out of the box helps you to debug your software immensely. I couldn't program without them anymore. CodeSite and SmartInspect are comparable products with (about) equal prices. Download the trial versions to see what's your favourite.

Bye,
Bart

What are those prizes in the race? - Part 1

While the race is one I will write a little report about the prizes that the contenders are programming for. First up will be the DevExpress components. This one is easiest for me, as I am a current user of the VCL subscription package.

I've written about various parts of the DevExpress components before. If you've read those postings it's not a great surprise to you that I am a big fan of the DevExpress components. This posting is basically a song of praise. I've written before that the standard that DevExpress works on, is what we strive for in our company. That sums it up really...

DevExpress website
While technically not a part of any of their packages, the first thing that you experience is the DevExpress website. I thought I'd mentioned this because it can make a huge difference in the first opinion that you have about a company and their products. The DevExpress site is beautifully layed out (although a bit bombastic for my taste) and you can find any information that you like very quickly. Their support sections is up there with the best to be found on the web. All of this gives you great confidence about the products you are about to buy.

VCL subscription
Now, here's a tip that will actually save you money. Go for the VCL subscription package immediately instead of buying that one companent pack that you think you are looking for. I started with the navigation controls first, purchased the grid controls later and ended up buying the VCL subscription. Although you get some discounts of you ask for them, in the end you will pay more money. If you go for the VCL subscription in the first place, you get the lot immediately. And you will get all the beta releases of new components first, so you can immediately dig into those.

Overall quality
The overall quality of the controls is really excellent, with good online help and examples. All the components have plenty of properties to tweak them to your liking. Special attention is given to the look and feel of the controls. There's about nothing that you can't reconfigure with regards to the way the controls appear in your program.

However, a couple of things can be said. There are some components that haven't been updated in a while. I found myself using the navigation controls, the grid controls, the editors of course and the cxLayout components a lot. The other controls I don't use that much.

Look and feel
Recently DevExpress released the ExpressSkins libray which is used to apply skinning to your controls. That means you can give your application a very unique look and feel. There's a skinning editor to create your own skins and of course there are plenty of ready made skins to choose from. It took me about a day to add a user configurable skinning option to our software so each end user can select the look and feel of their choice. Great stuff.

Grid controls
I think DevExpress is best know for their incredibly good grid controls. DevExpress grids are very versatile, very fast, user friendly and offer unrivaled filtering and sorting capabilities. The only 'negative' thing that somebody told me once is that you can configure too much. True, it takes a bit of time to learn all the properties of the grids, but once you've got the concept behind the properties, it's not that difficult to find your way. And of course, a lot of properties also means that the control probably can do what you want.

Layoutcontrols
On different occasions I wrote about one of the frustrations of the last year or so. I started looking at the layoutcontrols once we got the VCL subscriptions. Before, I had read about the layoutcontrols, but to be honest, I didn't believe what DevExpress put up on their website. How could a set of controls relieve me from all the positioning that I was used to do on my dialogs? Not in a milion years a set of controls could do a better job than I did.
That was one of the biggest mistakes I made the last couple of years. I should have had a look before. If I had done, I would have started to use the Layoutcontrols ages ago. They are SO good that I still am amazed every time I use them. Positioning controls on a dialog has been removed from my tasks completely. The DevExpress layout controls take over all the hassle of making sure my dialogs look good.
The Layoutcontrols don't get much exposure but I honestly think those are the best controls that I ever worked with. You're a fool if you still are positioning your controls yourself. Go on, have a look at those and your life as a user interface programmer will change completely.

Schedular controls
Now, I haven't actually used the schedular controls yet from in demos and experiments. But, everytime I use them I am amazed at what I find. You can literally with adding one component implement a calendar feature to your application. There's not much more to it that adding the control and filling it with data. Of course to use the information in your software you would need to program a bit more, but the actual calendar and storing the calendar data is all taken care of. An excellent component that - if you have any use for it - will be much appreciated by your end users.

Navigation controls
The navigation controls (menu bars, navigation panes, ribbon controls) is what started me as a DevExpress user. Needless to say that using them is dream. Using the navigation controls means it's a no hassle, painless way of implementing a professional navigation interface to your software. One excellent thing is: there is a cxImageList control that supports PNG images. If you use PNG images (like http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/) you get excellent results. Much better than that old Win95 icons that you might be looking at in your software right now.

No trial version
I've seen comments on the web complaining that DevExpress doesn't offer trial versions of their software. That is true for the VCL components, although there are demos and there is a 'money back guarantee'. The .Net controls do come with a trial version though. To me, a money back guarantee is good enough but I think it would be better for DevExpress to see if they can implement a trial systems for their controls. Especially if you have large development teams, purchasing the controls means serious money and I think one is 'entitled' to be able to test the controls in real life. But that of course is a business decision DevExpress needs to make.

Summary
I'm not a dxExperience user, although I am using the ASPx packages. To summarize the C#/.NET packages: IMHO they are at least of equal quality to the VCL components, if not better. I think that the comments I have on the VCL package should be applicable to the dx components too. I've use the dx-components in their trial version and I really like what I saw. Very familiar way of working compared to the VCL controls.

All and all I couldn't give more praise to a company than what I did here. I truly believe (and not because they sponsor the race) that DevExpress has a great philosophy, offers unrivaled value for money and actually will save you a lot, a lot of time as a programmer. Their support is great and the VCL components still get their updates and new features. I only whish they had even more programmers working on the VCL components (it's quite obvious that their money is in the C#/.Net controls).

Bye,
Bart

Race on in its way: first reports are in...

The Race has started and the first progress reports are coming in. Go and read the website on a regular basis to see how the contenders are doing. Some don't publish their reports on the website, but on their own blog, like here: http://beauhinks.com/category/programming/darwin-race/

Bye,
Bart

DevExpress donates a great prize for the contest

DevExpress will give away a license to DXperience Enterprise or the VCL Subscription, the winner gets to pick either one. I think this is a great gesture and will be welcomed by the contenders. If ever you needed an incentive to make yours a last minute entry, now is the time.


For more information point to http://www.darwinraceoflanguages.com/.


Bye,

Bart

The race has started: 8 contenders rumble for the prizes

The race has started. 8 Contenders will program their tool of choice to win the prizes.

They will work on the problem that they picked and will keep a record of things that come up, documenting their experiences while programming. After two weeks (the duration of the race) their software and experiences will be published on the website for all of you to judge.

If you want to enter the race, you still can. You won't get more time, but if you think you are up for the challenge, please drop me a note.

Best of luck to all of them and I will post their notes when I get them during the race. So go check the website every now and then to read about their progress.

Bye,
Bart

6 contenders in the contest...

But, it is still the 7th of July, so you can still enter the race. The prices are good enough and you will help your fellow programmers in supplying valuable information about your tool of choice.

Tomorrow the race starts and the contenders start programming. After tomorrow you can still enter the race, but you will lose valuable time (the race ends at 22 July, no matter what).

So, go to http://www.darwinraceoflanguages.com and pick up the challenge.

Bye,
Bart

Branden Tanga enters the race!

Branden Tanga, the guy that gave me the idea for this race, just entered the race AND he will enter a Delphi program watching CPU load and temperatures.

Now, that's bravery for you. In my book he gets extra points just for entering.

So, come on everybody out there. We all (including me) were a bit harsh on him and told him that he should use the tool first, was completely false in some departments and do some real work before criticizing our favorite tool.

He picked up the challenge! How about you??????

Go to http://www.darwinraceoflanguages.com/ and read all about it. To enter, just drop me an email at bart.roozendaal@sevensteps.nl

Bye,
Bart

Three languages are now represented...

But, we need more than one programmer per language :- . So, are there any more programmers that want to join the race? You still have 5 days to register at http://www.darwinraceoflanguages.com/.

Bye,
Bart

The first participants in the race

The first two participants in the race (DarwinRaceOfLanguages.com) have entered: one Delphi guy and one Mac guy. We need (a lot) more to make it a true race. So, go on, go to the website and see how to enter this race.

There's also a suggestion by one of the participants that applications suitable for portableapps.com can get extra points. I think that's a very good suggestion.

If you think I should twist this or that rule, or maybe add another problem to the list to pick from, don't hesitate to let me know. The rules are still open for debate until 8 July when the race starts.

Bye,
Bart

The Darwin Race of Languages is on...

The race is on. A couple of hours later than I promised (sorry, I've got work to do also :-)) I put up the website and you can now officially enter the race.

Please point to http://www.darwinraceoflanguages.com for more information on what to do. If nobody enters the race, I get to keep the prizes! There were over 50 people that said they would enter the race: let's see how many of you will!

Please comment to this posting if you have any remarks about the problems to pick from, the rules, the schedule or otherwise. It's an open competition, but after 8 July the rules cannot change.

Good luck everybody!

Bye,
Bart

The Darwin Race of Languages - Part 4

Another sponsor has volunteered to give away a prize. RemObjects will give away a copy for Data Abstract. The winner gets to pick which version, .NET or Delphi.

Tomorrow will be the launch of the website with the rules of engagement, so keep your eyes on http://www.darwinraceoflanguages.com/

Bye,
Bart

The Darwin Race of Languages - part 3

The first sponsor has offered to come up with a price. GurockSoftware will kindly offer a license to SmartInspect as a prize for the race. I'm in contact with a couple of other companies out there. If you are a company that has products suitable for Delphi as well as/or for Visual Studio or any of the other IDEs out there, this might be a good time to have some cheap publicity.

To reassure any of the companies that are thinking of sponsoring: this is not a bashing contest. It's about getting and sharing real life experiences writing software. Taking away the basing of a product just because you think it's bad, is just exactly what started this little contest. Any bashing through comments or otherwise won't get published on the website.

So, if you are still thinking about it, maybe this little notice will help :-)

Bye,
Bart

The Darwin Race of Languages - Part 2

So, the race is on :-) If within 24 hours more than 20 people think they will enter the race, there's no holding back.

There will be a little web site next week on http://www.darwinraceoflanguages.com/. I will need a bit of time to work things out and put them up there, but it's already work in progress.

There are a couple of things that you can help me with:

1. Find C#, C++, Java or other programmers to enter the race. A race is not a race without different horses, is it? Spread the word amongst news groups, friends, colleagues, et cetera.


2. Help me pick a tool or program to build. I'm currently thinking of offering three subjects to pick from. I have the following suggestions:




• A GUI for a Firebird compression tool


• A tool to convert code on the clipboard to html for using it in a blog posting


• (we need more!)


3. Bug your boss to supply us with prices to give away. If you're the boss: handover those goodies :-). A small gesture is fine: it's all about honor anyway.
4. Go to http://www.dzone.com/links/the_darwin_race_of_languages.html and promote that up the ladder so more people in the developers community get a notice of this.

The plan so far

• 1 July: launch of the web site for the race. There will be some explanation on the race, what the purpose is, how to enter, et cetera. It will be a democratic race: there will be a voting system to pick a winner.
• 8 July: entry closes. The race begins. There will a short 2 week sprint in which you can spend as much time as you want to and can afford to. You don't necessarily need to enter a full working program; it's more about how the language and the tool helped or hindered you in your work - you will need to write something about that.
• 22 July: the race closes and the results will be published. Extra points will be awarded to people that documented their experiences during work. The voting begins.
• 29 July: the voting completes and the winner gets the price (whatever it will be...)

Plans of course can be changed, and the format of the race is much open for debate. So, please send in your remarks.

Bye,

Bart

The darwin race of languages

Update: the race is on

It's funny how fanatical people (including me) can get when we are talking about the IDEs that we favor. If someone comes up with some (partly false) statements about out beloved (...) Delphi, we all (including me) jump up and start making a case for our pet. I don't think the guy was expecting that many comments after his posting. I can almost see him scratching his head :-)

Now, I think that's a very good thing. My post about dying Delphi programmers was intended to stir up some things and in the end I might have found a (couple of) new programmer(s). Besides all the public comments I have had hundreds of reactions in my email box. So, I can concluded, the Delphi programmers are still fighting to come out of top of the Darwin race of languages.

Now, I was thinking. There already must be a developer contest out there to compare Delphi to other languages. I couldn't find one though (but that might be because it's still early days yet :-))

How about setting one up? Let's find a small program (if in the end it is also usefull, all the better) and let's see what the results are when developing it with, let's say, Delphi and C#.

Now, before all the comments come in :-) I know that we would probably only compare the capabilities of the programmer, not the language. And, choosing C# would probably mean choosing .Net. If we would use Delphi for Win32 that means a comlpetely different platform. But, nevertheless, I think it would be fun to see what would happen.

So, please send in your suggestions for a small, but usefull program that could be the subject for this. It could be something like my all time favorite Stickies, but anything goes really.

If you think this is a fun thing to do, I will try to arrange for this and maybe even find some sponsors for prices to award.

Bye,
Bart

Delphi's Play Of The Day

Nothing to do with Delphi, but this is my Play Of The Day

Come on guys, don't say you saw this one coming!

Correction: I didn't see it coming. As commented, this is a staged (I won't call it a fake) video. But, IMHO, that makes it twice as funny :-)

Creating an always on top web browser window

For one of the publications in the LearningGuide Manager we needed an 'always on top'-browser window with some information in it. The Learning Guides provide support information to end users. This information needs to stay on top while working on other software.

A normal browser window isn't suitable because you cannot make that always on top. In the past all kinds of hacks and workarounds were available, but tabbed browsing, increased security and the like make it impossible to do something from within the broser (I think ... if you think otherwise, please let me know).

The publications are HTML based and must run on every browser possible. In the past we used OCX-es to implement such features but with the increase in diversity of browsers another solution was needed, since there are only a few (...) browser that support OCX-es.

Here's what we did (I think it's kind of neat). We created a small application that is deployed on the client systems. This application does a lot of things, but also has a TIdHTTPServer which listens at the localhost of the client. It listens for special urls which can do special things.

One the commands is to open an always on top window which has a TWebBrowser component in it and will serve a passed url. E.g. an url like http://localhost/cgi-bin/show?http://www.google.com will popup an always on top window with the google website in it. There's a whole range of commands that can do special things - one's only limited to the imagination of the day.

Of course there are some measures to prevent abuse of this method (which I won't disclose here...) and in the end we have a platform and browser indepent solution to do all kinds of special things next to simply serve HTML files to the end user.

Bye,
Bart

Are Delphi programmers a dying breed?

For some time now we are looking for new Delphi programmers in our company and were unsuccessful in finding any Dutch programmers. We hardly had any response to advertisements and posting on job sites.

Of course, when you start doing that, you are approached by outsourcing companies. One of those contacted me 'at the right time' and we did a small trial project (not in Delphi though) to see what is involved when outsourcing software. The results were mixed (speed was low and quality was ... well poor). The price is right though, so that makes one hesitate. But, I found with this particular company - as well as with other outsourcing companies that approachedme - that they all could offer Delphi programmers, but "would start looking for one once the project goes through". None of the companies that approached me had any inhouse Delphi programmers.

So, adding that up, no local Delphi programmers are available, and no outsourcing company (that I know off) have inhouse Delphi programmers.

We are seriously considering switching to C#/.NET although programmers in that field don't come by the dozens either :- But at least, there are some outsourcing companies out there that say that they can deliver good C# programmers.

It kind of feels to me like the days when I still was a Cobol programmer. That breed almost died, and of course as a contractor that made sure you got a good price for your work :-).

Will the Delphi programmers go the same way? What do you think?

And hey, while we're at it, if you know any affordable outsourcing company with inhouse Delphi programmers, please let me know.

Bye,
Bart

SHFileOperation / Vista and oh boy ...

Yesterday I reported problems using SHFileOperation on Vista in a multi threading application. I experienced problems overwriting files when running Vista. The problems didn't occur running XP or Windows 2003 server.

For starters: it has nothing to do with multi threading applications - that was a false assessment on my part. I should stop working so late :-(

Comments from other programmers made me look again and create a small program that demonstrated the problem. I could not reproduce it using the small demo. So what gives?

It turned out the problems were cause by the specification of the file paths. The program I'm working on synchronizes folders, having the source on the web or on a local file system.

It turned out I was feeding paths using a '/' as a folder delimiter instead of a '\'. XP and Windows 2003 don't have a problem with that, Vista does...

In this case, changing the forward slashes to backslashes solved the problem. Still, kind of weird, but a smaller problem than SHFileOperation not being thread safe.

Bye,
Bart

SHFileOperation not thread safe under Vista

I found the 'cause' of the problems with the SHFileOperation function in Vista I reported earlier. It turns out that this function is not thread safe under Vista. It works fine with earlier operating systems when used in a multi threading application.

For now, the problem in my situation was (somewhat) easy to fix. I now execute the ShFileOperation in the main thread (using Synchronize) and that solved the problem with the utilities that I was working on. I can imagine that for larger application a bit more work would be involved. But maybe this little piece of information helps others.

I will implement the IFileOperation interface for Vista later on, but for now it can wait...

Bye,
Bart

IFileOperation replaces SHFileOperation on Vista

Today I got some reports from users that part of our file handling functions gave irregular results. On my development machine (a Windows 2003 Server) all was well and I could not replicate the problems.


After some digging into these issues I found a couple of postings (this one in de MSDN amongst others) about a new interface (IFileOperation) in Vista that replaces the SHFileOperation function.


Now, most of my code works just fine, but I have some specific problems with overwriting files that already exist. Some get overwritten, others don't. I suspect the SHFileOperation functions that (apparently) are still availble under Vista aren't quite backwards compatible.


Luckily I have created some wrapper functions in my code around the SHFileOperation functions, so it will be fairly easy to implement the IFileOperation method of Vista. But, being under pressure as always, this wasn't what I was waiting for right now :-o.



If I encounter any special issues I will let you know.



Bye,

Bart

I'll better my life as a designer, promised...

As you may read on my blogs I sometimes write for pdalive.com about using my smartphone and evaluating software on it. My last post was about Windows Mobile 6.1 on my TYTN II. Although the update was minor (from 6.0 to 6.1 is a small step after all), there is something in this update that made me realize something important about creating updates of my own software.


There is a couple of things in WM 6.0 that I always did wrong. E.g. when I want to lock my phone, I press and hold the red 'hang up' button. This locks the device so I can't make an accidental call to someone (something that happened quite a lot before I made a habbit of locking my phone). But, when you lock the phone, it locks with the current application in front. Most of the times I want the home screen active before I lock it. So, I made a habbit of activating the home screen before I locked the device. Frequently this means unlocking the phone, activating the home screen, and lock the phone again. But, I also want the first page of the HTC pluging (which displays a clock) active. So, most of the times, I unlock the phone yet another time, activate the first page on the HTC plugin before locking it finally.

Besides all the 'major' improvements in the WM 6.1 update, this is something that either Microsoft or HTC now does for me. Whenever you press and hold the read 'hang up' button, the home screen is made the active application and the first page of the HTC plugin is selected before locking the device. Apparently, other users found themselves performing the same procedure as I did in WM 6.0.

Now, what's all this got to do with my life as a designer? Well, I realized that I was very please to find such a small improvement in a new release of the software. It's not something a sales person can use to sell additional licenses with, but it is a change that makes the life of a uses just that tiny bit better.

I want to add more of such things to the releases of our own software. I want my users to get the same pleased feeling about our software when they start using a new release. I want them constantly thinking: hey, that's great! Simply because a little function or feature just does it's job a bit better.

From a commercial point of view it might be much better to have big new features in your release (like support flow charts in our upcoming main release version 6). But, and that is the promise, I will make sure that version 6.1 will have a big focus on all those little things that can make you go oooh. I think in the end, that will pay off, even from a commercial point of view.

Bye,
Bart

TYTN II Rom update: go for it

I couldn't hold myself. Yesterday some sites (I saw it first on the Dutch site www.allaboutphones.nl) reported the leaking of the offical to be ROM update for my HTC TYTN II. This update should include Windows Mobile 6.1 and - reportedly - speed improvements of the display drivers.

Of course I am also reading the forums of the XDA developers (http://forum.xda-developers.com/) where a lot of work is done on 'custom' ROMs. WM 6.1 is out there for quite some time now. But, since I am still in the warranty period of my HTC TYTN II, I never decided to install a ROM-update, although I was longing for it very much.

But I believed the posters yesterday, telling us that the leaked updates are the offical ones. The story is that they are leaked to have some 'cheap' evaluation with expert users by HTC. Fine by me. So this time I jumped in and installed this update and am now running on WM 6.1 on my TYTN II.

SO, what is it like? I can only say: great! The phone responds much faster, feels a lot quicker. It boots quicker and I get the feeling that the phone has come to life. I never found it that bad, despite my agreement with things stated at www.htcclassaction.org). But having the WM 6.1 update installed I can relate to the frustration of the guys behind htcclassaction.org even more. IMHO it's a disgrace that HTC has sold me a phone for a lot of money that could perform a lot better, simply by installing the right drivers.

Now, I also understand that the improvements are only partial of what the chips are capable of. I'm keeping an even closer eye now on all those hacker sites. I want more of these improvements, absolutely. My call to HTC: make these improvements even better en implement them for all phones. You will gain a lot of respect if you do and customer satisfaction leads to increase in sales in the end. To read my opinion on how great customer support helps sales, please read my blog item on that. I was seriously considering the upcoming iPhone 3G, but this improvement will make me wait a while. At least until WM 7 is out... I hope Microsoft will deliver something that is stunning. It needs to I'm afraid :-)

That's that on the speed improvement. Now, what about WM 6.1. Of course a lot is already said on that subject. Most find the improvements minor. You can't disagree with that, but I think threaded sms, zooming in IE and the overall speed improvement is very valuable. I was getting hooked on Opera mini, but the zooming in IE makes me doubt that a bit. So, here's another call to HTC: make Opera 9.5 mobile available on *all* your phones, not just the Diamond. It will hook your customers to your products even more. Most of us buy a new phone every 6 - 24 months and chances that being a HTC improve vastly if the customer is satisfied.

So, if you're not a hero, wait for the official ROM update, but get it as soon as it's there. It is very much worthwhile. If you are a hero, go get it now.

Google for RUU_Kaiser_HTC_WWE_3.28.405.0_radio_sign_25.83.40.02_1.65.16.25_Ship and you'll find the English update.
Google for RUU_Kaiser_HTC_NLD_3.29.404.0_radio_sign_25.83.40.02_1.65.16.25_Ship and you'll find the Dutch update.


I'm only so sorry for everyone that doesn't get this update on their HTC phone...

Bye,
Bart

Windows Ultimate Extras is a sham... I agree

Today I finished installing Windows Vista Ultimate edition. My machine was ready for a fresh install, something I do about once a year. Since we have a partnership with Microsoft I decided to install the Ultimate edition. Who doesn't want that anyway? I want everything in the Ultimate edition if that's available :-)

When I finished installing this version I went looking for all the extras that I remembered that were promised by Microsoft. I only found the poker game. The DreamScene did't want to start when I had two monitors connected to my portable. After disconnecting the external monitor I enjoyed the videos on the desktop for at least a minute or so. Then I realized that M$ was asking a ton of money for, well, just a handfull of useless things. Yes, more fun, but not for longer than a minute or so. Not worth the money at all. Although I am very MS-minded, I was very disappointed with what MS calls the Ultimate. I found this nice looking website which I wouldn't have otherwise, so there is something good in all this :-)

Btw, I had some problems installing update 2 of the BDS 2006 I am using, but found this article that solved the problem. I had to read it three times to realize I had to start the command box as an Administrator, but I'm up and running now.

Embarcadero: you'd better keep Delphi/Win32!

The storm of postings has died out (a bit), so let's give my two cents worth. First of all: I'm only thinking about Delphi for Win32 here. I'm not particularly interested in the other CodeGear products I'm afraid. So I won't bother you with my comments about those.

All the postings on the aquisition are quite positive about the future of the products, Delphi for Win32 not excluded from that. I'm not so sure though. A take over/merger like this inevitably will lead to a refocus of the future of products and services. Embarcadero will probably take this opportunity to save and extend profitable products and cut those that are not. Now is the time to do so: everybody (employees / customers / partners) will be open for that and will understand such moves. It's common sense, right?

If the above thought is true: what are the chances for Delphi/Win32? Somewhere along the line the following discussion will come up:

(boss/financial manager/commercial manager): Ok, we've cut the number of products. What do we do?
(A): Let's drop Delphi/Win32
(B,C,D..Z): NO! We can't! There are too many developers and products out there.
(A): Well, let them move to Delphi/.NET!
(B,C): That's a thought. Yeah, why not. I never had a problem with that...
(D,E,F..Z): But, that's a completely different way of working for them...
(A,B,C): They probably will have to anyway in the future and most of them won't mind.
(D,E,F,G): That's right, I never had but positive effects since I changed.
(H,I,...Z): But, what about the Tiburon? Didn't we just update the roadmap for that?
(A,B,...Y): If they want Unicode and stuff: let them use .Net. It's the future. And of course, they can always keep using Delphi2007.
(Z): Why doesn't anybody ever listen to me?

I would really hate it if this happens, but - to be open and frank - I could relate to such a thought. Cut the (large) number of products and focus on the ones that have the real future. It would give me an immediate problem (well, not that immediate, there's always Delphi2007, right?) but I would understand it, really.

But, I don't think I would switch to Delphi.Net to be honest. I think C#/.Net would really come into the picture in that case. Give the problems I have to find good Delphi developers (if you know a good Dutch Delphi developer send him/her to me now!) I would really consider leaving Delphi.

Others might go that line too. So, Embarcadero: you'd better keep Delphi/Win32!

Folders kept in use

Some time ago I noticed that a couple of small (conversion) programs of mine showed some strange effect. Folders that were used were kept in use. If, even after closing down the program, I tried to delete the folders, Windows told me they were in use.

I looked high and low for this, but in the end found the cause of it all. I didn't close a Find in the folders. Putting a try..finally in the code did the trick. This guaranteed closing the Find, no matter what. So, if you experience that folders are kept in use, go look for this one.

procedure foo;
var
 sr: TSearchRec;
 ok: boolean;
begin
 ok := (FindFirst('*.*', faAnyFile, sr)=0);
 try
  while ok do
  begin
   goDoSomething();
   ok := (FindNext(sr)=0);
  end;
 finally
  FindClose(sr);
 end;
end;

Bye,
Bart

The top 10 tools every (Delphi) programmer needs

This week I was at a client site to talk about our ways of developing software. Our client uses Delphi for developing their software too and are contemplating using DevExpress' components for their next generation software.

I was stunned to find that (until now) they only use Delphi. That's it. No other support tools or component libraries (apart from the Virtual Tree List).

That meeting inspired me to list the tools I think are absolutely necessary or at least very helpfull in developing (Delphi) software.

1) A professional component library.

As you may have guessed DevExpress is my top one favorite. I hardly need any other components to implement a professional user interface. There is *no* way you can get better results for the amount of money you need to spend on the library. I would always recommend the VCL subscription. It will set you back $500-$1000 every year but you will get a ton of components for that.

There are a couple of alternatives that you might want to look into. I'm sure that I will get some recommendations in the comments on this post :-) Let the list grow...

2) A logging tool / component

Of course you can use OutputDebugString to print debug statements or you can write your own logging tool. But there are a couple of professional libraries out there that already have done that for you (and more than you probably think of at first) and that are extremely usefull.

My favorite is Raize's CodeSite, but SmartInspect is very good also. Again, I'm sure there are others out there.

3) An exception catcher

I don't know another word for this type of tool, but I'm using two actually. Madexcept (which is my favorite, and only $25 for a commercial license) and EurekaLog. It will help you explain exceptions, especially when your software is already in the wild out there.

4) A bug administration tool

There are a couple, but my favorite is FogBugz. It's reasonably priced and does the job very well. It also has a simple but very effectie planning and time tracking feature. It will handle registering the status of issues, mailing to clients, handling received mail, et cetera. Excellent stuff.

5) Version control system

Now, I was perplexed to find that the client I visited didn't use a version control system. I couldn't think of a workable environment without it. We are using Visual SVN Server and Turtoise as a client. Even if you are in a single developer environment you should take the time to set this up. Don't let the costs scare you: it's free...

6) Creating setups

Every piece of software should be delivered in a setup. There's a couple of free (and not so free) tools out there, but we are using Wise for Windows. That's a bit old actually, but does the job very well.

7) Build tools

Now, eventually you have to deliver your software. You can build your software and assemble and distribute the setup by hand, but invest some time in setting up a professional build tool. Once you got the right scripts set up, delivering your software is a snap. We use Automated Build Studio. I actually wrote a testimonial on that which you can find on their website. Good support too.

8) Debugging tools

I don't use many other debuggers from the one in Delphi, but if you need some special things (like profiling the performance of your application), you might want to look elsewhere. We are using AQTime but I don't need it that much to be true. It's only at special occasions that I start that.

9) Unit testers

Every other month or so I tell myself I have to develop some unit tests. I never get to it, but writing this piece makes me a firm believer in unit tests again. I will, honestly, setup some unit tests.... Really, you should do it to.

10) Documentation

Now, here's a bit of plugging our software. How could I ever use anything else but our software for that? Google does it, SAP does it, Microsoft does it, so I'd better use it myself too :-)

If you want more information on what our products can do to your documentation (not only as a technical documenation tool, but for a great variety of documentation needs), please don't hesitate to contact me.

That's my list. What do you have to add, strike or comment?

Bye,
Bart