Delphi Developer Notes

Finally closing this blog

2007-09-24T11:01:00.000+02:00

Well, it is about time to close this blog officially, however, not without starting a new blog on my own server. So yes, I will start blogging again and I will write about Programming with Delphi (and C#) as well as other aspects of my life.

The new blog supports categories and is just starting, so you have not missed anything so far ;-)

To read my new blog, go to http://www.gumpi.com/ and start reading.

Thanks to all readers in the past, and hello to all readers to come.

* * * THIS BLOG IS CLOSED NOW * * *

Kick-Start database models

2006-11-13T11:58:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me an interesting link. Barry Williams has provided the community a wide ranging set of "kick start database models", which allow you to get a little head start when creating new database designs for projects. For many different topics you'll find the basic diagrams. Over all you'll find currently about 400 diagrams, a list still being updated over time.

Link: Database Answers: 'Kick-Start' Data Models

Thanks to the whole BDS Team

2006-11-06T17:44:00.000+01:00

Today a personal note from me to the whole BDS team over at Borland / DTG!

The last months haven't been very kind on me and took more time from my personal life then I would have liked to commit to anything. I didn't even find the time and nerves to tell the team itself since I took some responsibilities on and couldn't work them as needed.

However, today I got a package delivered with FedEx and I'll let the pictures speak. Now, this box has seen quiet a lot Delphi people, the letter states the whole team.

THANKS!!!

Borland DTG comes near your home town

2006-11-04T15:49:00.000+01:00

The Borland DTG Germany is again on the road and coming to three towns this time. To Cologne (Köln) on November 21^st, to Lucern (Switzerland) on November 23^rd, and to Dresden on November 29^th. Be sure to come and visit us when possible.

You'll get a DTG update, information on Peleton and InterBase 2007. Daniel Magin and I will talk to you about migrating your old Delphi 7 (and older) VCL applications to BDS 2006 and VCL.NET. We will also talk about the upcoming Vista release (I hope I'll get the final build from MS next week) and how to prepare your VCL apps for that.

So, register and come visit us: http://www.devtracks.de/

Running the BDS 2006 IDE against MS.NET 2.0

2006-11-04T15:32:00.000+01:00

Hello,

now before you all get hyped, first the disclaimer: RUN AT OWN RISK, YOU CAN DESTROY YOUR BDS SETUP WHEN NOT FOLLOWING THIS INFO TO THE LETTER!

A week ago a friend of mine told me, that he has his IDE running against the MS.NET 2.0 framework, rather than the MS.NET 1.1 framework. And thanks to a much better J# implementation Togehter runs much smoother, less memory consumption, faster reaction times, etc... Sounds great? Well, it is great!

Now, where is the drawback? Simple, it will only work for Delphi Win32 and C++ Builder. Do not attempt to use those steps against the full BDS or any of the .NET personalities. With high possibility you will destroy your whole BDS installation and with some luck your Windows setup as well. Not scared, then read on!

Copy your $(BDS)\Bin\bds.exe and name the copy bds2.exe. Do the same with the bds.exe.config and name it bds2.exe.config. Open the bds2.config file and look for the node-entry configuration\startup. Change the value of the version attribute to version="v2.0.50727". Now, you have to have the MS.NET Framework installed, start the BDS2.EXE with the paramater -pDelphi for the Delphi Win32 personality and enjoy.

So far I have not hit any problems using that little feature, just more fun!

P.S.: I'll now start blogging more again, sorry for the long off-time.
-- Daniel

Google Code Search finally...

2006-10-25T12:53:00.000+02:00

while I have been rarely online and working with Delphi in the last weeks for personal reasons, I just noticed that Google Code Search finally supports Delphi as language :-)

Google Code Search

The logs again...

2006-10-15T14:15:00.000+02:00

Well, I was asked for the current statistics and here they are (just our server)

prereqs.exe: 1
prereqs.zip: 810
prereqs_de.zip: 166
prereqs_en.zip: 19
prereqs_fr.zip: 2
prereqs_jp.zip: 1
prereqsde.zip: 890
prereqsen.zip: 1
prereqsfr.zip: 31
prereqsjp.zip: 43
turbo_de.iso.zip: 1
turbocpp.exe: 484
turbocpp_de.exe: 474
turbocpp_de.iso.zip: 209
turbocpp_en.exe: 91
turbocpp_en.iso.zip: 58
turbocpp_fr.exe: 14
turbocpp_fr.iso.zip: 6
turbocpp_jp.exe: 49
turbocpp_jp.iso.zip: 5
turbocppcd.png: 95
turbocsharp.exe: 295
turbocsharp_de.exe: 317
turbocsharp_de.iso.zip: 141
turbocsharp_en.exe: 14
turbocsharp_en.iso.zip: 31
turbocsharp_fr.exe: 7
turbocsharp_fr.iso.zip: 2
turbocsharp_jp.exe: 32
turbocsharp_jp.iso.zip: 4
turbocsharpcd.png: 65
turbodelphi.exe: 721
turbodelphi_de.exe.zip: 1
turbodelphi_de.exe: 1469
turbodelphi_de.iso.zip: 599
turbodelphi_en.exe: 44
turbodelphi_en.iso.zip: 185
turbodelphi_fr.exe: 25
turbodelphi_fr.iso.zip: 6
turbodelphi_jp.exe: 44
turbodelphi_jp.iso.zip: 6
turbodelphi4net.exe: 253
turbodelphi4net_de.exe: 381
turbodelphi4net_de.iso.zip: 204
turbodelphi4net_en.exe: 21
turbodelphi4net_en.iso.zip: 46
turbodelphi4net_fr.exe: 11
turbodelphi4net_fr.iso.zip: 3
turbodelphi4net_jp.exe: 24
turbodelphi4net_jp.iso.zip: 3
turbodelphi4netcd.png: 71
turbodelphicd.png: 185
Total Downloads: 17320

Summary of the EKON X and EuroDevCon 2006 at Frankfurt/Germany

2006-09-29T18:27:00.000+02:00

Well, sorry for being late with this entry, however, finally it comes to your screen and it brings you a few pictures I've taken during the EKON 10 in Frankfurt this week.

First off! It was a lot of fun and great to see all of you again this year. Be sure to drop me an email if you have been there and have visited one of my sessions at dwischnewski {at} gmail [dot] com. I'd love to know what you've liked, and what could'n should be improved. I actually got a few requests to do one of those sessions in English next time so I'll have to think about that.

But now, I just want to show some of the pictures and drop a few words here and there as apropriate ;-)

First I want to show you a few pictures I've taken during the technical keynote of the EKON. To bad I missed those other keynotes.

On this image you see the speakers of the panel, that actually did show some live coding during the keynote. On the left, you see Jon Harrison, who demoed "Peleton", the next version of JBuilder based upon the Eclipse framework. He did a small web service demo, which he designed using an UML diagram. This diagram he exported as XML file. He then "skyped" this file to Gerard van der Pol, who imported that into ECO and wrote the same web service using ECO and Delphi. Cool stuff!
To their right are David "DavidI" Intersimone and Nick Hodges. David talked a little about the road maps while Nick Hodges demoed Highlander (.NET 2.0) and (yeah!!!) NDataStore. It seems like DTG will resurrect NDataStore (and JDataStore with it). I dearly hope so, it would be a great feature to have.

And thank you Gerard for using my Community Welcome Page!

DavidI wore during most of the session his cool new Sushi Chef head band he got from one of the japanese employees of DTG. The symbols on it are bringing luck to the wearer.

The keynote was directed by Jason Vokes, a great member of the European DTG group.

Masoud Kamali, the founder and managing director of the Software and Support Verlag, which held the EKON conference, was speaking a few words to the audience too.

Hey Jeremy, this picture is just for you!

Further they told us not to expect the Compact Framework support in the IDE with the release of Highlander, but some time after that. Probably as download for the registered users.

Next part I want to show some pictures is the CodeCamp. The CodeCamp session allows the attendees to ask specific questions to their problems to the speakers of the conference. There were different tables set up, each table with a specific topic.

However, before the CodeCamp actually started, the team of Masoud surprised him and the audience with a small party for the 10th anniversary of the EKON conference. So, they asked those attendees who have visited all ten EKON conferences to come upfront. All of those are invited for free the year, congratulations to them!

They had a real big cake too. This one lasted for two days until it was either all finished or they simply thought the rest was to old to eat. Who knows ;) It was good but very, very sweet. I only had one piece which will last me quiet some time I guess.

And here you see Daniel Wolf, administrator of the Delphi-PRAXiS and author and maker of some of the famous BDS/Turbo videos enjoying his beer at the CodeCamp.

Now just some images from the EKON with no more words ;-)

Dynamic Action Menu Items on the Fly

2006-09-29T18:25:00.000+02:00

At the CodeCamp session of the EKON a visitor of the conference came up to me asking me, how to populate a totaly empty action main menu with menus and sub menus. Most of you have seen the action manager components and used them, however usually only, or at least mostly using the visual tools of the IDE.

I guess we were sitting there about one or two hours (off and on) trying to solve their problem. We even asked quiet a few more conference attendees if they would know a solution to the problem. All in all, I guess, we were 8 people trying to figure that one out - to no success. So later, I wrote one of the people I really know they love the action components and asked for his advice and he basically wrote back, that even he does not know a solution to this problem. Btw, using various search engines didn't offer any success either.

Now, two days later, sitting in a session of Marco Cantù on Web 2.0 stuff, it hit me straight into the face. And the solution is actually rather simple. If you simply drop an action main menu on your form, you'll have to add a new action bar to your action manager and connect this with the menu. Now you can go ahead and add menu items to it. To create sub menus within a menu, you have to create a new TContainedAction and assign that to the menu item. Further, you have to set the caption of the TActionMenuItem separately. I have added a sample to Borlands CodeCentral for you to download. It does everything programatically and should be easily adaptable for your purposes.

CodeCentral: download for registered members (Delphi 2006 and C++Builder 2006)

Analyzing the Logs...

2006-09-08T14:50:00.000+02:00

Well, the last days were tuff on my download server, I guess. I got around and finally wrote a small analyzer tool, which waded through the log files and counted all files together. It has dropped most canceled downloads and counted those done with a download manager only once. Well, following the numbers:

prereqs.zip: 550
prereqsde.zip: 703
prereqsfr.zip: 16
prereqsjp.zip: 37
turbocpp.exe: 464
turbocpp_de.exe: 348
turbocpp_fr.exe: 11
turbocpp_jp.exe: 47
turbocsharp.exe: 232
turbocsharp_de.exe: 226
turbocsharp_fr.exe: 6
turbocsharp_jp.exe: 31
turbodelphi.exe: 766
turbodelphi_de.exe: 851
turbodelphi_fr.exe: 25
turbodelphi_jp.exe: 48
turbodelphi4net.exe: 200
turbodelphi4net_de.exe: 266
turbodelphi4net_fr.exe: 11
turbodelphi4net_jp.exe: 22
Total: 9720

This averages for a total traffic of 3.8 Terrabytes. Good that I don't have to pay the traffic ;-)

ISO Images online

2006-09-08T12:49:00.000+02:00

Just wanted to let you know, that we finally have the ISO images of the Turbo products online, too. Further you'll find PDF files for printing CD labels.

The downloads have somewhat slowed down, so you should get good traffic again, without having to use BitTorrent or similar tools. ;-)

All Turbo Explorer Products

Want more than one Turbo on your PC?

2006-09-08T08:47:00.000+02:00

Well, Andreas has done it again. He provided yet another tool for your PC. This one will allow you to install different Turbo Explorer products on your PC. Since he does not have Turbo Professional licenses he cannot test his product against those. Therefore try that on your own risk ;)

His blog entry and download

Want to see the DP-Server image?

2006-09-06T18:08:00.000+02:00

Well, I just had a laugh. Our administrator just published an image showing the server load. The lower spikes show the normal high life moments on the server, usually 70 to 100 users maximum within the last 5 minutes. Well guess when we started publishing the Turbo mirrors...

FYI: the Delphi-PRAXiS is the largest German language Delphi-Forum and hosts the information page for my download server (a different one!).

FYI 2: we expect to hit the 1 Terrabyte turbo traffic by noon tomorrow.

FYI 3: If you get a "service unavailable" message from our servers, try again later. It simply meens that the connection limit is reached.

Sorry for all who just got kicked

2006-09-06T14:29:00.000+02:00

We have upped the band width from 90 MBit/s to 96 MBit/s, however, I have set the connection limit to 500 users. We just reached 900 concurrent connections, which left each downloader less than 10 KB/s. Now, each connection should get around 18KB/s. Still not much, but better than getting less and less each few minutes as numbers just started to sky-rocket.

Sorry to all who have to wait, but it is better once you get your slot ;)

Turbo ISO images

2006-09-06T13:06:00.000+02:00

Well, we are getting ready to put the ISO images for the Turbo editions online. However, stay put as this will be finished some time tomorrow, I guess. Currently we leave the bandwidth to all you downloaders, so uploading the turbos (from Borland servers on fire) to our server will take a while longer ;-)

Server on Fire...

2006-09-06T12:11:00.000+02:00

Well, the Turbos are in real demand. Our download server is scratching its limits. I had to limit the download bandwidth to 90% of the overall band width available, since we still have paying customers on the server ;-)

The front-end of the downloads, the Delphi-PRAXiS server is sweating and catching fire. Our administrator has put this new logo on the top bar.

Also interesting, the list of users online today (at noon). It says: 7825 users visited today: 905 registered, 106 hidden, 6814 guests. 1757 uses in the last hour. Below a list of the registered users of the day....

Last, but not least an image of the network traffic on our server :-o

Turbo Editions are online

2006-09-05T22:14:00.000+02:00

Well, just a few minutes ago, the Turbo editions of the Borland Developer Studio were officially available for download.

Demand was so huge, that some already figured out the correct links a few hours ago. But feel free to get them now.

For members of the Delphi-PRAXiS free downloads are available through one of our Frankfurt based servers.

Home Page: turboexplorer.com
Downloads: Official Download Sites

Turbo media seen "in the wild"

2006-09-04T11:58:00.000+02:00

Today the DTG of Borland has a DevTrack show in Hamburg, Germany. What do you think they will have in the raffle? Right, Turbo products. And here for you real pictures (mobile phone cam) of the products... (click for larger version)

WPF and .NET 3.0 with BDS 2006?

2006-09-03T18:33:00.000+02:00

I just ran across one interesting post that shows how you can access WPF and other .NET 3.0 features using the BDS 2006.

Okay, it is an quiet easy sample, and question will be would you want to do larger ones this way, but it is possible.

Read the post on Bob's Delphi Stuff

View your Pocket PC on your PC

2006-09-02T21:45:00.000+02:00

Yesterday a friend of mine mentioned an interesting application to me, that mirrors your pocket pc screen live onto your desktop. This is a really interesting feature when you want to demo your application to a larger audience as you can simply use a beamer for showing the whole setup to your audience.

The tool is available for free from Microsoft.

Questions about the Turbos?

2006-09-01T21:26:00.000+02:00

Well, if you are still not sure about the Turbos, what to expect, what you'll get, what you wont get, then you should read through the FAQ Borland has provided.

Read the FAQ!

OpenSource ISAPI Extension Loader for Debugging

2006-08-25T13:09:00.000+02:00

This is the second installment, as an afterthought to OpenSource ISAPI Filter Loader for Debugging. Just as updating Filters normally forces you to restart your IIS, so does updating an extension.

How does it work?

When you setup the ISAPI Filter for your web site, instead of deploying your ISAPI extension, you will deploy mine. Rename my ISAPI extension so, that it matches the name of your DLL. So, if your DLL is called SomeISAPIExtension.dll, name mine SomeISAPIExtension.dll, too.

Now rename your ISAPI extension to SomeISAPIExtension.upd, short for update. ;-) When the IIS sends the next request to my ISAPI extension, it will look for your update. It will then rename it to SomeISAPIExtension.run and load it into memory and pass all requests along.

When you have another update, copy it as SomeISAPIExtension.upd into the same directory. Within 10 seconds (default, or 500ms debug-mode) my ISAPI extension will look for the update. Finding one, it will unload the current extension and rename it to SomeISAPIExtension.bak, rename yours to SomeISAPIExtension.run and load it. Then, your new version will start to handle all requests. NOTE: This process can take upto one minute. All incoming calls are pooled and passed to the new version as soon as it is loaded.

I created this little tool as an afterthought just now. As it turned out, Egg-Loader is for those extensions and not for filters. I hope you enjoy it, too. There are some things that can be done to enhance it for debugging, and it is not designed for live services!

Download at Borland CodeCentral: ISAPI Extension Loader for Debugging.

OpenSource ISAPI Filter Loader for Debugging

2006-08-25T10:32:00.000+02:00

A member of our German Delphi community, had a problem with a product named Egg-Loader. What does it do?

Well, basically it is an ISAPI Filter which routes requests from the IIS to your ISAPI Filter. When you have an update of your Filter, you copy it into the directory where the current one is deployed, but with the extension .update instead off .dll. The Egg-Loader will then unload the current version and use the updated instead. I wrote such a tool a long time ago, for myself. Now, I decided to open-source it. It has done a great job in developing our in-house software Content ACE v3 and v4.

How does it work?

When you setup the ISAPI Filter for your IIS, instead of pointing IIS to your ISAPI Filter, you will have to point it to mine. Rename my ISAPI Filter so, that it matches the name of your DLL. So, if your DLL is called SomeISAPIFilter.dll, name mine SomeISAPIFilter.dll, too.

Now rename your ISAPI Filter to SomeISAPIFilter.upd, short for update. ;-) When the IIS sends the next request to my ISAPI Filter, it will look for your update. It will then rename it to SomeISAPIFilter.run and load it into memory and pass all requests along.

When you have another update, copy it as SomeISAPIFilter.upd into the same directory. Within 10 seconds (default, or 500ms debug-mode) my ISAPI Filter will look for the update. Finding one, it will unload the current Filter and rename it to SomeISAPIFilter.bak, rename yours to SomeISAPIFilter.run and load it. Then, your new version will start to handle all requests.

This little tool has helped me a lot during development. I hope you enjoy it. There are some things that can be done to enhance it for debugging, and it is not designed for live services!

Download at Borland CodeCentral: ISAPI Filter Loader for Debugging.

Two of you have downloaded before the latest update *g* The community member just told me more details about his problem. My version had the same problem. This is fixed now *g* How is that for support?

And yet another video

2006-08-24T21:25:00.000+02:00

While Marco Cantù has blogged about two nice videos I stumbled across another old goodie from the Delphi 3 CD. You remember when back then they wanted to rule space and make earth a better place to live on...?

YouTube: Delphi 3 CD goodie

Late, but do not miss

2006-08-23T19:38:00.000+02:00

Today, at 12 pm PDT Jason Vokes will be online with Nick Hodges on the Delphi Hour. This is 9 PM CET, about 90 minutes from now.

Do not miss!

Spread the word, Nick told us kinda late this time...
Link to Event Central

How to develop in Delphi when you're blind

2006-08-19T15:17:00.000+02:00

Marco has done it again. He posted a great blog entry on how he works with the whole IDE, especially the code editor itself, this time. It's amazing how he manages it and he even writes about the one thing that bothers me most: looking at your code in whole. Think about it, whenever you write code you do look at the directly lines above and below, even without thinking about it. And Marco simply does not have the slightest chance to do just that. He always has to know where he is and what his next "crime" will do to his code...

Read it, it's well worth the time and it will help you thinking about people who are not sighted when doing you own development.

Speaking of it... Hey Marco, how is the new design of my blog working for you?

Ah, before I forget, the link: How I work in Windows and the Delphi IDE

Great Turbo videos to look at and some 8mm material

2006-08-19T15:13:00.000+02:00

Well, Mr. Video, aka Daniel R. Wolf, has done it again. He got hold of a Turbo Delphi copy, Borland Germany provided it, and created yet another video. The video even features some never before seen 8mm material of Borland Pascal from the early nineties. You should definitely take the time and have a look. It is fabulous!

The video: Turbo Delphi Videos (German and English available!)
DivX-Codec required (free): DivX Homepage

Totally different than expected, but nice ;-)

2006-08-19T13:00:00.000+02:00

Well, just letting all you newsreader know, a long time in coming, the new design of my blog is online. It is very minimalistic, but I do like it. Some tweaks still need to be done, especially for friends like Marco.

Let me know how you like the look of the page :)

Gear up and switch on your Turbo

2006-08-18T16:05:00.000+02:00

NOTE: this article is a translation of my article in the recent Borland Germany newsletter published at Die neuen Turbos – Ein Anwenderbericht.

During the last weeks and months, we thought about the old Borland times. Back then the names like Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ got us excited, made us dream. Back in the eighties and nineties, the Turbo product line was one of the most successful developer tools product line available on the market. Later we had Borland Delphi and Borland C++Builder, which where quiet successful too.

Today we have a totally new IDE, which was developed under the codename Galileo. And about three years ago four languages where merged into this one IDE: Delphi, Delphi.NET, C++ and C#. Yet, many developers just need one of those languages to work with, they don't want an IDE with four languages...

Well rejoice, the Turbo family is coming home
Very soon the Developer Tools Group (DTG), currently part of the Borland Corporation, will bring eight new products on the market: Turbo Delphi, Turbo Delphi for .NET, Turbo C++, and Turbo C#. Each of those products will be available as freely available Explorer edition and as well priced Professional edition.

The "small" Turbo, the Explorer editions
All four Explorer editions will come bundled with the Borland Interbase 7.5.1 database server for development. They will contain all components needed for database development, something not seen in a long time in the lower end versions of the Borland developer IDEs. That is definitely a step in a promising future for all.

Each explorer Edition will come with over 200 defined drag- and drop components ready for use right out of the box. The VCL components will include the most recent additions like the TTrayIcon, TFlowPanel, and TGridPanel components.

It may come as a surprise to you, but you will get UML support with the explorer editions for your Delphi, Delphi.NET, and C# projects. You will not be able to design stand-alone UML projects, but you will have them for your language specific projects. The UML support is two-way, you can code and import that into your UML project and you can design UML and export that to your code, just as you do in the big BDS suites.

However, the .NET editions (Delphi for .NET and C#) have another surprise ready for you: ECO support. One of the most exciting features of the recent BDS versions will be available for free, however only XML persistence is supported, just as in the BDS 2006 professional editions. Please remember, since ECO is a .NET feature, this will not be available for Turbo Delphi (for Win32) and Turbo C++. The .NET editions also come bundled with the NUnit testing framework.

But let's not stop exploring the Explorer editions just now. There is another goodie never seen in free editions before: you get the full VCL and RTL source code. This is one of the key features of Delphi since version 1, you are always able to look up what is going on on the inside of your apps. This time however for free!

The Professional Turbo editions
Basically, one could say, the Turbo Professional editions match the Borland Developer Studio 2006 Professional edition, however, they just come in one personality (language) flavour and do not have all four. This allows you to get the full Professional power for your language you like.

Besides all that you get in the Explorer editions, you get third party tools (where applicable) like RAVE Reports, IntraWeb, and the Indy component suite with your Professional version.

Further only with the Professional editions you will get the power to install any third party libraries right into Delphi to expand your components tool palette and add other features to your IDE. This will open a whole new world to you as you can install things like JCL, JVCL, madExcept, etc. into your IDE.

Getting your Turbo installed
Depending on the Turbo product you chose, you will have to install some prerequisites, such as the MS .NET Framework, MS SDK, XML DOM 4.0. The installer will take care of those things for you.

Next you install your Turbo just as any other application. The Explorer edition and the Professional edition come on the same medium, and the serial number and authorization key will be selecting whether you have an Explorer or a Professional edition installed. In order to use all features you will have to register your copy, otherwise some features may be disabled.

NOTE: Please refer to original article (link at the top) for a simple feature matrix.

Last, but not least
Watch out at turboexplorer.com for further announcement and downloads.

Screen Shots
Some screen shots can be found at Borland Infocenter Germany (direct link)

Have fun using your new Turbo :)

How to design a form when you’re blind

2006-08-15T16:57:00.000+02:00

Marco Zehe has posted information on how he works with Delphi when designing forms. Interesting read: How to design a form when you’re blind.

In a second step he has updated the article with images showing his steps in a more detailed way for us sighted persons. ;-)

Borland Developer Conference 1996

2006-08-15T14:01:00.000+02:00

Have you been there? No, well, watch that video just linked on turboexplorer.com.

A very good video for you

2006-08-12T20:06:00.000+02:00

Well, not much new to learn, but you will love to see it. Some musik and the father of the good ol' Borland, Phillipe Kahn will introduce the concept of OOP to you. Hopefully you will not need that information for your daily development life anymore, since you should know it alright. Even the father of our beloved Pascal language, Niklaus Wirth, is talking in the video.

Go see at turboexplorer.com

The Turbos are back

2006-08-07T22:06:00.000+02:00

According to an interview with DavidI, Borland will bring back the Turbo tools.

David Intersimone, vice president of developer relations and chief evangelist at Borland, said the Turbo product set includes Turbo Delphi for Win32, Turbo Delphi for .Net, Turbo C++ and Turbo C#. Each version will be available in two editions: Turbo Explorer, a free downloadable version; and Turbo Professional, a version priced at less than $500, he said.

Borland will offer more information at turboexplorer.com, which is yet to go online.

The Delphi-PRAXiS Project 2006

2006-08-06T13:45:00.000+02:00

Daniel R. Wolf, founder, administrator and desperate house elf of the largest German-speaking Delphi community has started a Blog (in German) where he will regularly write about the development phases of the next relaunch of the community site.

The current Delphi-PRAXiS is based upon phpBB. phpBB once was the best open-source forum available. But due to lack of (place whatever fits here) the project is slowly going down the drain. However, to ensure a long and prosper existence of the next Delphi-PRAXiS, Daniel decided to use vBulletin as base. vBulletin is not free, yet its price tag is well worth the software. It has a great architecture and is promising to be a very good base for Germany largest Delphi community.

Photosynth - this project sounds good...

2006-08-01T18:36:00.000+02:00

In case you haven't heard about Photosynth, you should visit LiveLabs and see the documentary video.

For now there is not much more to do than wait, but when it comes, I can fathom some ideas how to integrate that into your own apps, hoping that Microsoft will give us a good API or WebService to access the features :)

A new blog on the horizon...

2006-07-28T10:30:00.000+02:00

I thought I let you know, that the first all-German blog on Borlands blog server has arrived. Matthias Eissing, the Delphi Evangelist for Germany, Austria and Switzerland has started his, finally. Let's hope for some interesting entries and not to many disappearing texts ;-)

Go visit his blog: Matthias Eissing

It is there, but the BDS installer requires the .NET SDK 1.1

2006-07-25T14:19:00.000+02:00

I have read a few accounts where the installer of the Borland Delphi Studio does not allow to install the Borland Developer Studio, because it expects the Microsoft .NET SDK 1.1 to be installed. Yet, looking into the list of installed applications, it is listed just fine - and it works as well.

Today one user found the reason for it, which may well give the standard solution to this problem. You can install the MS .NET SDK without installing the .NET Framework itself. Thus, the prerequisits installer will install the .NET Framework, but not the SDK again. Yet, the installation of the SDK will be a little different, then when installing it after the .NET Framework and this difference will lead the BDS installer to the assumption that it is not correctly installed.

Solution: simply uninstall the complete MS .NET SDK and reinstall it and you should be ready to go.

Minimum Requirements for the BDS

2006-07-25T13:45:00.000+02:00

Over and over again I see questions like: do I really need Windows XP Professional to run the Borland Developer Studio 2006 (or 2005). It does say so on the packaging and the web site. I do use Windows XP Home and would like to stay with it.

While I cannot understand why one would prefer the Home edition, except being on the short side of money, I can answer the question. You can install, run, and use the Borland Developer Studio 2006 (and 2005) on your Windows XP Home edition, however, you should be aware, that you cannot use all functions of the software. Most obviously you will not be able to use the Microsoft Internet Information Server (MS IIS) support built into the Borland Developer Studio. The MS IIS is not part of Windows XP Home and cannot be installed upon it (at least officially). However, for testing purposes, Borland does deliver the Casini web server together with the Developer Studio. Most functions you can test within Casini on XP Home. So, if you do not need to worry about IIS specific development, go ahead and use the Borland Developer Studio on your Windows XP Home desktop.

Note: There may be other functions within the Borland Developer Studio 2006 (and/or 2005) that may rely on functions, that are part of Windows XP Professional, but not included in the Home edition. However, at this point I am not aware of them. Any purchasing decisions are based on your own risk ;-) Check out the trial edition first.

Did you save your Delphi files...

2006-07-24T17:09:00.000+02:00

and all those others?

Well, when looking for a new back up utility I came across a free solution named SyncToy, which is offered from Microsoft.

SyncToy is really easy to use. Simply select the source and the destination folder, the "sync method" and you are ready to go.

Synchronize synchronizes both folders with each other
Echo writes all changes to the destination folder
Subscribe pulls all changes from the destination folder, if the local folder has the files already
Contribute pushes all changes and new files to the destination, but leaves deleted files intact. Good for your digi-cam images
Combine copies new and updated files both ways, but leaves renamed and deleted files intact.

Best is, you can automate it, so it runs every night and backups your software to another storage ;)

06 | EuroDevCon and EKON 10

2006-07-24T11:56:00.000+02:00

The summer has arrived in the nothern hemisphere, not to say that some people would rather see the cooler times again. However, as we do near the end of summer the German Entwicklerkonferenz (Developers Conference) EKON 10 comes up on our schedule. This year it is paired together with Borlands EuroDevCon. Basically the same admission prices, the same schedule and the same speakers.

So I hope to see you there.
Official EKON 10 web site: www.entwicklerkonferenz.de
Official 06 | EuroDevCon web site: www.eurodevcon.com

Great, Shenoy! Good job!

2006-07-12T14:42:00.000+02:00

Deepak Shenoy has posted a great article on creating live templates for the current BDS IDE. The template features an auto-PInvoke code generator for both, C# and Delphi.NET. For Delphi.NET he uses BabelCode in the background for translating his C# code to Delphi.NET.

The source code is available for download at Borlands CodeCentral.

BDS Documentation Reloaded...

2006-07-05T15:13:00.000+02:00

Well, just in case you didn't see the article on BDN: the technical documentation team is asking for your input on how you would improve the help system which comes with the "DTG" Developer Studio.

Go ahead and submit your suggestions!

And I am sure you do agree that the help needs improvements!

DTG/DevCo: Nick joined, Jens returns, Investor selected

2006-06-17T20:38:00.000+02:00

Well, this have been some busy days and I did not have the time to comment on all those news that appeared on blogs around our planet.

But first: Congratulations to Nick, I am happy to see that you join the Developer Tools Group as Delphi Product Manager. As much as his person is debated, I think he is the (probably) best choice there is. He loves Delphi, he spreads Delphi, he uses Delphi, he develops Delphi, he is Delphi ;-)

Next: it is good to read that Jens-Ole Lauridsen is back and together with Steve Shaughnessy JDataStore and NDataStore will hopefully either come back or appear on the market. This would really fill in some market gaps there are for mobile in-process databases.

Last, but not least: Borland and the DTG have selected an investor. No more news at this point, but you can read it in a small fragment of a sentence in Allens blog:

OK, besides already having an investor selected and being a separate company...

... so, who is it!?

Or did he only mean to say, that this would be even better news...?

SqlCommand Parameters

2006-06-14T17:32:00.000+02:00

Today I've lost quiet some time looking for an error in an assembly, which was loaded into the MS SQL Server 2005 as CLR user defined function.

When creating SQLCommands, I usually set something like SELECT * FROM [Table] WHERE [Field] = @Field as CommandText. Later in my code I declare the parameters I need like cmd.Parameters.Add('Field', SqlDbType.NChar);. Until today, I never had a problem using this approach. I knew, however, that I could have written cmd.Parameters.Add('@Field', SqlDbType.NChar); and it simply worked the same way. Since I didn't see any need to repeat that @, I didn't do it, ever (for sake of consistency). Until today...

Using C# 2.0, the first version works the same in any assembly, until(!) you load this assembly into the SQL Server 2005 and use it as CLR user defined function. Then it'll blow with a message saying: Incorrect syntax near 'Field'. At this point you'll need to include that @, when declaring the parameter.

I don't know why it behaves differently at this point, but I do know, that I'll include it from now on in any place it comes, until...

64 Bit - staying calm is better

2006-06-12T12:05:00.000+02:00

Well, Borland has corrected the roadmap during this weekend and it seems that it was rushed out a little. John Kaster wrote in the public news groups that he assumed it was proofread before he published it. I guess he will not assume that again.

Now, Highlander itself will not include a native 64 Bit compiler, but 64 Bit .NET 2.0 support for WinForms and VCL.NET. Current plans are, for "DevCo" to release 64 Bit native compiler tech previews during the coming months after the Highlander release for registered Delphi users. Probably C++Builder users too, I'd say. ;-)

Anyway, 64 Bit is still of a little bit, but it will be coming. Hopefully, soon enough. Good for me, I can put of bying a 64 Bit computer a little longer, as I just upgraded mine to have a dual XEON processor board with HT on each CPU. Yet it is still 32 Bits and I couldn't play around with the 64 Bit features yet.

64 Bit - all hyped? - stay calm!

2006-06-09T17:59:00.000+02:00

...for now, anyway. Some already are all ready to buy the next Delphi, codename "Highlander", because of the following quote:

In addition, 64 bit code generation will be added to the Delphi native code compliers to support native 64 bit development and debugging.

Now, most will remember that native 64 Bit was anounced for possibly 2008 and the graphic a little higher says so as well. What is the correct information now...?

You will now in about 24 hours, when the expected update of the article is online. For so long, stay calm ;-)

Link: The article

First Look at Word 2007

2006-05-26T14:23:00.000+02:00

Well, I have started toying around with the new 2007 Microsoft Office System. Fancy Name, huh? Well, in this post I just want to fly over the MS Office Word 2007 features, that will be the most obvious ones, and a few things that I played around with. As all of us like to see those first, here is the current Beta splash screen, nothing really new here...

Well, and when you first look at it, it does look different. And, it is different. Forget all those shortcuts through the menus, you have used so far...

In fact, only one menu item remains, everything else has been moved to the all new ribbons. Note: Microsoft does not call them toolbars anymore, those are ribbons. And the file menu itself has changed. It is much clearer, yet some items do not really related directly to the file opened. But they had to put some things somewhere, I guess.

Well, let's create a new document. From the file menu, go to New... and you will be greated by the all new New Document window. Usually you'll see the featured templates to begin with. On the right is a list of the most recently used templates.

But there are more views. Like the localy installed templates, which yet lack a preview - for which reason, I do not know - and the online library hosted by Microsoft. Select any category and you'll see a live list of templates available for download. Note: the dialog is downloading the preview in the background, 10 previews are available, more will come in in just a few seconds (well, not on this screen shot anymore ;-))

Well, let's import an existing document. I'll take the one created for my first BDN article. When loaded, I first saved it in the new Office Word format. The file extension is .docx. In fact, all MS Office products now save the files with an additionall x at the end. I do not know what it stands for. Someone told me, that it denotes the new XML file format, but looking at the file, it is not an XML format. But anyway, below you see the icons for older Word formats (.doc) and the new one (.docx).

Once you have saved the file in the new format, Word will still preserve a backward compatibility mode, which easily allows you to save your document for use with older versions. From the file menu, you can select Convert and Word will forget about those restraints.

Now, once you see those ribbons and if you are like me, how can you navigate them without using your mouse. Well, it es easy, simply tap your [ALT] key and release it again. All items accessible through any [ALT]+[...] combination will show a little hint giving you there access key(s). Below you see the three step navigation to change the document color theme ([ALT]+[P]+[TC]). Press [ESC] at any point to cancel this navigation mode.

But, let's take a look at those common ribbons you will have to get used to. Those ribbons should be accessible at all times and at any place in your document.

But what happens when you select a picture in your document? Well, the another ribbon (or more) will appear at the top. All ribbons will show only when their features are required. This way Microsoft hopes to keep the interface much cleaner and easier.

As you know it from those good old toolbars, ribbons will collapse too, if the screen size is too small. First some of the larger items will scale/collapse down and next those rarely use will shrink to a drop down button. The next image shows this behavoir with the Home ribbon. Note, at the bottom, each ribbon area shows its name.

Another nice feature, once you get used to everything moving around when you use it, is the live preview of styles. Select some text and test the styles that come with the document template. As you move your mouse across those styles, Word will automatically display a live preview. Once you select a style, it will be applied permanently (until you use undo ;-)).

Next, I have found another feature, which I'll call the Most Wanted-Feature. Not because it is the one I was waiting for, but it is the one, that probably gets you the most wanted functions... When you select some text with your mouse, Word will automatically move the most used items right next to your mouse cursor. This is neat. I love it.

Now, it will take some time to get used to the new Microsoft Office Word 2007 and the way you work with it. Users who use it often, users who know it inside out, by heart, and while sleeping will have a hard time to get used to it. But I believe this will be somewhere between 3 to 5 percent of the current users. Everyone else will move right into it and start working with it. It is great and I will play around some more with it. Once I got it figured out a little more, I'll start to play with it and I'll try to add some new ribbons. I don't know how, yet, but things.take.time ;-)

About 3 hours remaining...

2006-05-26T00:16:00.000+02:00

I just thought I let you know. Currently, I am downloading the MS Office System Beta 2 Kit 2007 - Program Disk, the MS Office System Beta 2 Kit 2007 - Server Disk (Office Project Server 2007), and the MS Office System Beta 2 Kit 2007 - Server Disk (Office SharePoint Server 2007). Much later today - it is 0:15 a.m. - I'll start installing the programm disk and will start poking around ;-)

Stay tuned for the first information coming up here...

AdSense is working!

2006-05-22T13:42:00.000+02:00

Wow, last Thursday, my Google-AdSense-Account just grew over 100 USD in one day. Since my blog definitly is not generating much, not that this realy does matter, 100 USD do make an impact. How did this come?

Well, did you note AdSense-Ad below the AdSense-generated-Ads. Someone signed up for it on December, 2nd last year. Only one person has done so, since I have that button on my page and just has hit the 100 USD mark with his ad-clicks. And for those first 100 USD he earned, I got my commision last Thursday.

Cooooool :) Thank you, whereever and whoever you are!

Delphi SpeedUp - update to version 1.72

2006-05-19T10:39:00.000+02:00

Since my last post about the Delphi SpeedUp tool, a few smaller updates have surfaced. Andreas is still working to improve the tool and to remove any bugs found by the users.

The current version, available for download is 1.72.
Download the tool/installer (ZIP, 250 KB)
Download the source code (7zip)
View the original thread (German)

Have fun and a blinding fast IDE!

Where does the Community Welcome Page get the update information...

2006-05-18T16:54:00.000+02:00

I was asked, where the update information are coming from, which are displayed in the Community Welcome Page. Well, basically it is a chronological mixture of the orignal BDN update feed, which is shown in the original Welcome Page within Delphi 2005 and the Borland Developer Studio 2006 and a blog I maintain here. The RSS feed is served from one of our servers and can be accessed through your newsreader from http://tools.monster.gatenetwork.com/DDNBlogRss/Updates.aspx.

It contains an additional tag named source, which tells you whether it comes from the BDN or from my blog.

Community Welcome Page - Version 2

2006-05-17T15:09:00.000+02:00

Today, I've finally uploaded the update for the Community Welcome Page. Besides some bugfixes (like missing scroll bar for small resolutions, path names with ampersands (&)) there is a all new feature. John Kaster has provided a new BDN web service, called YAPP - Yet another pretty printer.

This service allows you to format source code to HTML, directly from within the Delphi IDE.

Visit Borland CodeCentral to download the update.

First time - Delphi ASP.NET application on MONO

2006-05-15T11:26:00.000+02:00

Well, I just ported, for the first time, an ASP.NET application, written in the ~~Borland~~ "DevCo" Developer Studio 2006 from IIS/ASP.NET 1.1 to MONO 1.x on Apache. An application developed during a developer seminar at BMW roused the interest of one of the participants. He hosts his webs on Linux machines with Apache. Over the weekend, he installed the MONO .NET framework and we got started about 90 minutes ago in adapting the application.

We changed the MS SQL ADO.NET driver to a MySQL .NET driver and adjusted the Adapter and the SQL Command to the MySQL components, compiled, deployed and started it. It works great. We tested the whole setup on a Debian Linux in a VM with only 64 MB RAM! Not fast, but fine ;-)

He is getting ready to move from PHP to ASP.NET. There is nothing like displaying data in a browser with almost no coding. Try that with PHP!

Developer NOW!

2006-05-14T16:14:00.000+02:00

Well, last week I went to Mülheim a.d. Ruhr and listened to DavidI and Jason Vokes and what they had to say about the "DevCo" aka Developer Tools Group (DTG). There wasn't much new, but a few things should be mentioned I guess.

There are a few companies interested, which at present take a closer look at the facts and numbers of the DTG
They are aiming to have the investor and the final name of the DTG by the end of this summer. The EKON (September 25th - 29th, Frankfurt, Germany) was mentioned.
In the current group of investors are neither soft- nor hardware companies
Currently 180 employees are selected for the DTG, they are aiming for about 250 to 300 employees once things get rolling
Highlander is aimed for the first quarter of 2007. Main goal is .NET 2.0 support and first things for Windows Vista.
New .NET language features will be ported to the Win32 compiler. They have mentioned Generics
There will be a few hotfixes coming up for the current BDS 2006, after the update 2 has been made available for all languages.

Note: this list is copied and translated from an entry by Daniel Wolf of the Delphi-PRAXiS ;-)

Administrators and Microsoft

2006-05-11T16:41:00.000+02:00

The other day I went to a Microsoft seminar on the upcoming 2007 Microsoft Office System (note: system is still written all lower case on microsoft.com, but wait and see...). While it was a really interesting evening, one fact made me smile.

What do you think, how long has been the Update 1 for the new MS SQL Server 2005 been ready? Well, Microsoft has learnt from the old school administrators and their fear and suspision when installing new software. They'll usually wait for Update 1... Well, guess what, Update 1 has been ready 4 weeks before the MS SQL Server 2005 has been released to market.

Go figure... ;-)

Check out Visual Forms from Jeremy North

2006-04-28T11:36:00.000+02:00

Finally I had the time and chance to check out the new Visual Forms Expert Jeremy North has written. Since he does not have (yet) a demo available, I thought you might want to read an independent opinion on this tool. Well, most know that I am not much into visual application development, yet there is one large VCL application, I am currently supporting at BMW. And this one just seems perfect for checking out Visual Forms.

So, I have installed this new tool into Delphi. The installer makes that really easy and already shows something else brewing on Jeremy's computer. Take a closer look at the version selection box ;-)

Within the BDS you can now access the Visual Forms using CTRL+SHIFT+F12, note the relation to the normal form selector window. For projects, where you have not Visual Forms before, you will see an empty list. You have to refresh the list once before using it. The expert will open all forms and make snapshots of them and caching them for its view. This cache is persisted between your BDS sessions. All settings can be adjusted from within the IDE.

Once you have set up Visual Forms for your project, which takes just one click and less than a minute, even for projects with 30 forms, like mine, you can select your forms visually.

Pretty soon you will dock the Visual Forms window into your BDS default working layout and make sure, that you'll always have easy visual access to those forms. I have put it in the right lower corner bundled with the Tool Palette and this is where it will be from now on.

So Jeremy, please add support for project groups. Currently when working with project groups, only the forms of the selected project are listed. How about all at once ;-)

Thank you for this great addition to our beloved IDE!

Developer NOW! - Meet DavidI

2006-04-25T11:31:00.000+02:00

DavidI is traveling once again. He will come to Mülheim (close to Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Wuppertal) and talk about DevCo and the future of our favorite tools InterBase, Borland Developer Studio and others.

Also, you will meet Jason Vokes, Ingo Düppe, Daniel Magin and Bernd Ua. Be sure to check it out and possibly come.

More information: Developer NOW! Homepage

Delphi SpeedUp, now for BDS as well

2006-04-21T22:15:00.000+02:00

In my last post I presented you the Delphi SpeedUp expert for Delphi 5-7. It worked on BDS 2005/2006 as well, but now has been heavily optimized for those environments as well.

Further, Andreas has made available the full source code. Give it a try (at your risk), but users do love it.

Delphi SpeedUp, D5 - D10 (BDS 2006)
Delphi SpeedUp Source Code
Original Post (in German)

Have fun and let me now how you like it ;)

Give your Delphi a performance boost

2006-04-19T10:31:00.000+02:00

Andreas, a member (nick jbg) of the Delphi-PRAXiS has introduced a plug-in for Delphi 5, 6 and 7, which will boost the overall performance of your IDE.

The Expert will replace some of the vital functions with functions from the FastCode library, as well as replacing TList methods with those from FastObj. The whole expert will do that during run-time, so once you remove it from the IDE all will be back to normal. Give it a try, currently he offers version 1.4.

Delphi SpeedUp 1.4
Delphi SpeedUp Installer Source

Attention: use at own risk! ;-)

Community Welcome Page - Spanish uploaded

2006-04-17T15:48:00.000+02:00

My deepest apologies, once more to Albert, I forgot to include his spanish translation in the first upload. Finally, after fighting CodeCentral once again, it is online and available for download at the same address, too.

So, forgive me please, for dropping your work in the first upload. Therefore, your fixes and suggestions are included as well.

For all of my readers, stay tuned for a summary of first comments, suggestions and ideas. It will be online here, soon. Just waiting a little more. Some nice suggestions are pouring in, already.

Community Welcome Page - finally arived!

2006-04-16T13:47:00.000+02:00

Just wanted to let you know, that the upload finally worked out and you can download the Community Welcome Page from CC/BDN now.

CC Entry

Community Welcome Page - finally ariving...?

2006-04-15T16:22:00.000+02:00

So, it has taken much longer than I hoped for. Sadly this didn't add to the features, it has just taken some time for things to get set up, like a new BabelCode server, translations, final tests, supporting Borland Delphi 2005, and so on.

I have created a CodeCentral entry for the Welcome Page, got pretty much all finished, just the upload does not work, for some reason. So I have put in a request to do a download to CodeCentral from one of our servers. I'll try to contact John Kaster tonight and hope to get this finished.

Further, I am preparing an article for the BDN giving some more insights on the workings of this Community Welcome Page.

Keep checking out the BDS Community Welcome Page entry in CC, it will be up shortly now.

Have fun,
Daniel

Developer Studio 2006: finally targetting the impaired developers again

2006-03-29T16:40:00.000+02:00

Borland, especially Steve Trefethen, has put a focus on getting the VCL (read ActionBand Components) ready to be used by visually impared people. Since Borland Delphi 6, the Delphi IDE has used those components itself, virtually making it impossible to use by people who have to rely on screen readers, such as JAWS. Microsoft has put a lot of effort into Windows, helping those people. Learn more about it at the Microsoft Accessibility web site.

Well, with the Developer Studio 2006, Borland has enhanced the VCL components to work with (for) such screen readers. And thus, the Developer Studio itself can be used again by visually impaired (read: blind) people. The first edition in 6 years!

Recently I got to know Marco, who is in this situation. He is happy being able to work with the new Delphi. Not everything works just now - image using Together without seeing, but the base parts are back working. He can design forms, use the editor, use the IDE menu again, read error messages, etc. Be sure to check with his blog he just started. He is in the midst of getting JAWS scripts ready to work with the IDE, hopefully he will share tose, or even sell them.

Eager to use Delphi.NET for .NET 2.0? Start now!

2006-03-17T11:11:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I played with the DCCIL command line compiler and noticed an interesting compiler switch called clrversion. And yes, it does exactly what its name suggest, it loads another CLR version of .NET, rather than the default one "v1.1.4322".

Therefore, I took out my .NET 2.0 installer and installed it in my BDS 2006 test VM. It never saw the version 2.0 of .NET before ;-) So far so good. I started the Developer Studio 2006 and created a new, simple console application. Thanks to the .NET SDK from my Visual Studio 2005 VM I found a simple test case rather fast.

program SimpleSampleNET2;

{$APPTYPE CONSOLE}

uses
  System.Text;

begin
  System.Console.BackgroundColor :=
    ConsoleColor.Blue;
end.

Console applications for the MS.NET Framework 1.1 do not support changing the background color through System.Console.BackgroundColor. So it does not compile within the Developer Studio against the .NET 1.1.

Okay, create a .dpr file, copy this "complex" lines into it and save it into a folder on your disk with the name SimpleSampleNET2. Enter following command line into your command line (will not work yet, but never mind that now; not the path for the -NS switch!): dccil -CC -NSC:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727 --clrversion:v2.0.50727 --no-config SimpleSampleNET2.dpr

You'll see the Delphi compiler loading the .NET 2.0 framework. The success is announced in line 3: .NET Framework v2.0.50727 loaded. Next it'll load some of the assemblies needed and create the "dcpil" files as needed. However, it stops with an error when trying to include the Borland System unit: SimpleSampleNET2.dpr(1) Fatal: F1026 File not found: 'Borland.Delphi.System.dcuil'

Well, go to $(BDS)\source\dotNet\rtl and copy the file Borland.Delphi.System.pas to your application path. Now you simply need to recompile the system unit for .NET 2.0, using the following command line: dccil -CC -NSC:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727 --clrversion:v2.0.50727 --no-config -Q -M -y -Z -$D- Borland.Delphi.System.pas. Never mind the warnings and that single hint there.

Now, compile your little application again: dccil -CC -NSC:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727 --clrversion:v2.0.50727 --no-config SimpleSampleNET2.dpr. Success!

Now, in the command line, start your little application. If you do not have "Blue" as background color already, it should be changed now, as we have done just that in our code. It works! It is a .NET 2.0 application written and compiled with the Delphi 2006 .NET compiler. Just to be sure, copy that little application on a computer that only has .NET 2.0 installed (not .NET 1.1) and test it. It'll work just the same there.

Take it from here and have fun!

EDIT:

On Request I have bundled a small package for you (ConsoleApplication.zip 8KB). It contains:

make.bat
SimpleSampleNET2.dpr
SimpleSampleNET2.exe

It does not contain the Borland.Delphi.System.pas file! Copy that from your installation path as instructed above prior to running make.bat.

Borland "DevCo" publishes an updated Road Map

2006-03-17T10:55:00.001+01:00

You may recall my post from the EKON 9 where I showed you the road map Borland showed us for Delphi for the first time ever. Well, we all have heard by now, that Borland has been doing some updates and when you read the PDF from the DavidI has shown during the Japan Developer Conference, you will see the new road map on page 19.

Besides the updates names you see a few small changes in the time line. Highlander has moved back to the beginning of 2007, rather than the middle of this year. Delphi for Vista seems to have moved a little, too. Therefore Windows Vista is mentioned for Highlander as well and(!) much more interesting, ECO will be coming for the VCL.NET. That is something I call commitment to the VCL.

Take yourself some time and read the full PDF, there are more road maps and some interesting information in it ;-)

Connecting your Work Areas

2006-03-15T15:00:00.000+01:00

Today I called a friend of mine at Borland Germany. Last time I visited their offices he told me about a program he uses to connect his computers to one keyboard/mouse setup. Since then I forgot all about it, including the name.

As life goes, I talked with another friend of mine about just this, so as written above, I called Borland ;-) The program he mentioned is called Synergy.

It is open source and works on different platforms (Unix, Linux, Windows, ...). You install the program on each computer/work station you want to connect. One has to be the server. This computer will offer the keyboard and mouse for each of the computers you connect. After the initial setup you can use the same mouse and keyboard on each of the connected computers. This considerably cleans up your desktop. All you have to do is get enough room for all those screens ;-) Anyway, it's quite cool. It even shares the clipboard among all computers.

Go and give it a try ;-)

Do you have a Delphi Blog in your Language?

2006-03-15T11:16:00.000+01:00

If so, please send me the Blog URL, RSS, RDF or Atom Url and just to be sure, tell me which language it is written in.

Mail to dwischnewski {at} gmail [dot] com

Thank you,
Daniel

Task accomplished, moved our system onto Delphi 2006

2006-03-13T14:36:00.000+01:00

After I had crashed my office computer two weeks ago, I finally decided to install Delphi again. Now, usually comes the question which versions do I want and in which order would I want to install those.

Since we do not actively support our product version 3 anymore, which is out of development over three years now, I decided to not install Delphi 5 again. If a bug arises within the core our customers have lived with it for about 4 to 5 years now. So there will be a sensible way around. Further did we not receive any bug messages for over 2 and a half years on this version, so that I feel fine with this decision. Delphi 5 will not be installed on the development machine again. Good bye good ol' friend. *wave*

Now, I had to decide for our current product release, Content ACE v4, which is in release 3 by now. The baby is one and a half years old and I did do big changes at its core during the last three months. Not even bug fixes on my part :-) So, I decided, I do not want to install Borland Delphi 7 again, just for our main product ;-)

Dare me! I will try to move the whole setup to the Borland Developer Studio 2006 and finally get the advantage of those new memory manager, the FastCode Project functions, better string handling and so on. Especially the IDE is what prompted me to take that step.

Five hours later I just got finished with the first test runs of the system. We are talking here of about 100 MB Source Codes (including the ModelMaker models) compiled into 50 executables, libraries, resource files, etc. I had to get the three 3rd-party libraries up-to-date and installed, which was relativly painless. Worse was the setup of the whole environment as we had restructured our server infrastructure last week. All search paths needed to be adapted. :-|

Anyway, we have just moved the binaries to our primary web server and after 5 minutes of update-time it is up and running again. First performance results should be in within 48 hours, a more detailed set of data in about a week. Stay tuned to see what a simple re-compile of your old Delphi 7 applications will do to their performance with the ~~Borland~~ "DevCo" Developer Studio 2006.

Community Welcome Page - Translations are on their way

2006-02-25T11:12:00.000+01:00

I just wanted to keep you all informed. The translations of the Community Welcome Page are rolling. A few issues and wishes came in. I will see whether I can fix them in a short time and then I will publish it on the BDN.

Just keep your eyes open, we are getting ready ;-)

DavidI, Michael Swindell and Jason Vokes live

2006-02-21T21:51:00.000+01:00

I have told you about the Delphi-Days. I have told you about the Live Video Conference for the keynote regarding Borlands announcement of the spin-out. See for yourself now, online. All videos are for download as EXE file. If you are afraid of EXE files, download 7 zip and use this tool to extract the videos ;-) The DivX video files are using a special Codec which can be downloaded at divx.com.

Keynote with Jason Vokes, David I and Michael Swindell
DivX Codec, AVI (Full Size, 365 MB)
Standard WMV (Small Size, 21 MB)

Delphi is back home at last...

2006-02-19T17:58:00.000+01:00

Well, I am back on the way home from the Delphi Days in Frankfurt. It was a quiet interesting event, especially the keynote with Jason Vokes, David "DavidI" Intersimone, and Michael Swindell.

They started of telling us a little about the Borland Developer Studio 2006 and the development cycle of it. Also, they assured us, that the development still continues, full steam ahead and that the IDE team is working on an Update 2 for the current version. But this was, where they stopped talking about the Borland Developer Studio and simply continued talking about the Developer Studio. They dropped the name of a company that is interested in ALM, and ALM only ;-)

So, you are waiting to read some exciting news they gave us? Well... no ;-) It was a great video session and we have heard many facts, but mostly you know them already. The named, for the sake of the keynote, the new company "DevCo" for "The Developer Company", which will focus on those IDE tools in the future.

"DevCo" will have new chances. While Borland will continue to sell its ALM tools mostly directly to big companies having key account managers working for their clients, "DevCo" will possibly follow other ways and hopefully focus on the small developer again. DavidI thinks it possible to push sales channels, like using the Internet for downloadable versions (which Germany already does).

"DevCo" will focus on us, the developer, again. The big company deals are left to Borland and the ALM tools. However, both ways, Borland will support "DevCo"-tools and "DevCo" will include Borlands ALM tools. This, for those of us, who use them already, will be a great chance to get the best of both those worlds.

All three of them emphasized that Borland (for now) and later "DevCo" will stick to the roadmap published last year. Yet, Michael Swindell said, that "DevCo" will have the chance, not only to stick to this roadmap, but to exceed our expectations in many ways.

Let's hope that we know really soon what will happen and hold your thumbs for great times ahead. :-)

Stay tuned for the list of questions and answers from the end of the session ;)

Stay tuned for more information on NewCorp ;-)

2006-02-17T14:05:00.000+01:00

I just found out that, we have a slightly changed agenda for tomorrow. Reminder: it is the Delphi-Days in Frankfurt, Germanies largest Delphi Developer Meeting this year.

Jason Vokes will, together with DavidI and Michael Swindell, talk about Borlands plans to spin-out the IDE products. They will answer questions from the audience, as far as possible. DavidI and Michael Swindell will join us via video confernce from Scotts Valley.

Let's see what they've got to tell us ;-)

Community Welcome Page - Translations needed

2006-02-16T13:17:00.000+01:00

The Welcome Page update is close to your door step and will arive there within the next few days. However, I would like to have translations for the Japanese and French folks out there too.

How would be willing to translate a few strings from English into those languages?

Further: who would like to cross read the English strings, just so that it does not look to bad inside the Borland Developer Studio IDE? Just fixing needed here ;-)

Thanks in advance. Post here or send me an e-mail to dwischnewski [at] gmail {dot} com.

Update: Following languages are covered as of now ;-)

English
French
German ;-)
Japanese
Catalan
Danish
Spanish (Spain)
Portuguese (Brazil)
Portuguese (Portuguese)

Camera RAW Image Thumbnail Viewer - Beta 1

2006-02-05T17:39:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, I saw an interesting tool at Microsofts homepage: Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP. However, as this tool only supports very few camera types (Canon EOS 5D and Nikon D50, D70s and D200) and I own a Panasonic FZ-30, I took it upon myself to come up with a similar solution.

At this early stage there are not all EXIF data parsed, not all formats supported and errors may come at some times. Presently, some camera RAW formats of Olympus, Canon, Sony, and Panasonic are supported, as well as some JPG/TIFF Extensions.

Be warned though, processing RAW images takes a certain amount of time, so your CPU might spike up to 100% at some points ;-) However, the Windows Explorer plugin works in the background and should not deadlock your computer.

Download: RAW Thumbnail Viewer - Beta 1 (1,6 MB)

Do you have more formats you would like to see supported? Drop me a line. You have RAW samples, contact me as well and we see how to get it done ;-)

Deploying your work with InstallAware 5

2006-02-04T11:48:00.000+01:00

Usually we deploy our software by hand. Shocked? Well, we do very few installations only, it takes about half an hour and it has to be highly customized. So there was never a great reason to do it otherwise.

However, times go on and we are looking into the next step with our software. I will not say: I have seen them all; but I can say: I have tested many. I worked with the Wise Installer, I abandoned NSIS, I loved InstallShield, but I have turned them all down when InstallAware 3 hit the market. Next I knew, I still did not have a great demand for installers...

Well so InstallAware 2005 and 2005 SE made it onto my machine, but I never really had to use them, as we were down the development road and did more consulting last year. Was great to, but now, we are getting ready to move on with our software and we will start playing with ASP.NET 2.0 rather soon. So I did take a look at the latest versions of some of the installer tools, once again. Breathtakin'!

But InstallAware 5 Studio just knocked me over! I have it on my machine and almost forgot about Delphi. Okay, not that drastic, but yes, the IDE got much faster, large projects with thousands of Registry settings, DLLs, and so on, still are ligthning fast loaded and administered within the IDE. Sinan has taken InstallAware a long way and creating installers slowly comes back to a place where one could say it is fun ;-)

Take a look at it at www.installaware.com.

P.S.: I do not get anything for this post here, it is written just because InstallAware really became awesome and I want to dip your nose into it ;-)

Delphi 2005 Personal Edition (German) as free download

2006-02-04T11:41:00.000+01:00

Borland Germany has offered us, as incentive for the Delphi-Tage, to offer the Borland Delphi 2005 Personal Edition as free download. In case one of you wants to take a look at it, go ahead, but be warned, it is the German edition, only. Service Pack 1 is included, others where never made available for this edition.

Go ahead, get a sneak peak and then go to Borland Developer Studio 2006, if you haven't done so already.

Download Portal and Information (German only)

SnowCamp '06 - Pictures

2006-01-29T15:02:00.000+01:00

Well, I am back from the SnowCamp '06 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. This post will show some of the 1000 Pictures we have taken out there. better-office has offered a great knowledge tour. I will write more about the things we've learned there at a later point. Today I want to show you some pictures Thorsten, Daniel, and I have taken there while going to the Zugspitze, largest mountain in Germany. Some are from other days, read the notes. ;-) All pictures are copyright by their owners, those not taken by myself are marked explicitly. Simply drop me a mail for a original of any of mine. Click on any of the pictures for a larger view.

On Tuesday most of us went sledding. It was great fun and sometimes quite fast ;-)

If you want to go to school, learning Delphi, you need to get a copy. Here we are, after geo-caching and finding our very own copy of the Borland Developer Studio 2006.

The mountains seen from Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Looks quite cool when the sun is setting, doesn't it?

The frozen Eibsee (Eib-Lake). It's temperature is a freezing 40°C below zero! You can see it from the cable car bringing you to the Zugspitze.

The same mountain, the same light settings, just different filter, effect and white balance correction settings. Looks great, doesn't it? <-- I could say that for almost any of the pictures we have taken up there ;-)

Six of us decided to stay a day longer (the Friday) and go up the Zugspitze and enjoy ourselves. And we did, though it was freezing cold, 16°C below zero. Though it felt much worse with the winds up there.

Daniel Wolf, administrator of the Delphi-PRAXiS looks quite cold, doesn't he? But he didn't mind, it was so beautiful up there.

Some more breath-taking views from up there. Remember, we are city-guys and we do not see such views everyday, as some of you may ;-)

Some big utility cars used to prepare the skiing pists. When we used sleds to go down the mountain, one was coming right at us. What a scary thought not getting your sled to stop in time.

Thorsten is inspecting the highest church in Germany. It's right at the Zugspitz-Glacier and all snown-in ;-)

Me in the snow ;-)

I told you, it is a snow camp. Sitting in the snow, starting your laptop and doing some delphi. Now, this way you got a freezing butt...

Daniel and me walking in the sun. Still freezing temperatures though...

I did try skiing. I've learned that I need to get a trainer next time. Did you know that skis are actually slippery? I knew before, but now I know that I can barely hold myself on them, let alone use them to get anywhere...

Why you should not use .NET for Windows and Explorer Extensions

2006-01-22T13:56:00.000+01:00

Shocked? Well, there is a single good reason why you should refrain from using .NET assemblies to extend the Windows Explorer or other basic Windows components. With this entry I do not want to start a rant against .NET, far from it, I do love .NET, well ASP.NET anyway. But it is not a good choice for example for desk bands, even though creation of such explorer extensions just got easier with .NET.

Why, I hear you asking. Well, let's say you have a file context menu extension installed, which is based on MS .NET Framework 1.1. Windows Explorer, itself not being a .NET application, will automatically load the .NET 1.1 framework to get the extension up and running. Everything works fine. Every customer of yours, using this extension will be just as happy.

Now, they install the MS .NET Framework 2.0, great framework that is ;-) And they install for example Paint.NET, based on .NET 2.0, not a 1.1 version. It will run and it will work. Well, most parts anyway. But there are at least two very basic things that will not. The Open and Save dialogs. Do you already guess why? Well, in .NET 2.0, as well as other versions of .NET, they still encapsulate the normal Windows Explorer (non .NET based) dialog controls. Can you imagine what happens here? Your .NET 2.0 application will start the Windows Explorer internally, which in return will start your .NET 1.1 file extension dialog plug-in when the user right clicks any file... This is not supported by the .NET environment at all, and it is - by design - not supposed to work. Go figure ;-)

Now just imagine your .NET 1.1 control and a .NET 2.0 control from another supplier both want to integrate into the context menu of the Explorer. It will not work, ever. The whole explorer will be shut down by .NET saying it is not supported. Have fun ;-)

In short: .NET is a great environment, but before doing everything with .NET think about possible consequences coming your way.

This said, I am off and preparing my trip to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where Daniel and Thomas will teach many more techniques on ASP.NET with Borland Developer Studio 2006. My Virtual Machine is all setup and ready. What a great week this will be... I'll blog about it, as Jason Vokes is bound to come you'll see some pictures, also.

For so long,
Daniel :)

Win your ticket for the German Community Delphi Days

2006-01-17T14:21:00.000+01:00

I told you before, on February 18th, we will have the Delphi-Tage in Frankfurt. If you think about coming and if you do not have a ticket yet, you may try to win one in the raffle at Delphi-PRAXiS.

It asks you to write an email to Gérome and tell him, why you believe that just you should be awarded a free ticket. There are three tickets to win.

If you do not believe in your personal luck, go to Delphi-Tage and buy your ticket, as they are soon sold out, if we continue at the current pace ;-)

DELL offers arriving - which one is the less worse...?

2006-01-14T12:08:00.000+01:00

Last week I got two DELL prospects arriving on the same day. One was targetted at my business partner, who has bought a DELL computer last year, and one was targetted at myself. I never bought any DELL computer and their chances of me doing so, just got less. But interesting those prospects are! - to say it Yoda-like. ;-)

The prospect with my name on it (remember: both arrived at our office headquarter the same day, January 7th 2006) has 8 pages. The one with my partners name on it has a "whopping" 24 pages. So, they think he is likely to buy another computer I guess, while they just try to get me.

Now, I look at the cover of my prospect and I see an offer for a Dell^TM Dimension^TM 3100. It comes with a P4 630, Windows^® XP Professional, 512 MB RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and a 17" TFT display. All for 599 Euro (plus tax).

So, what do they have for my partner? Well, it is a Dell^TM Dimension^TM 3100 Desktop. It comes with a P4 640, Windows^® XP Professional, 1024 MB RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and no monitor/TFT. All for 499 Euro (plus tax).

Now, I'll leave it up to you to decide which offer is the better one (click on the images for full cover scans), but I think those differences quite interessting. DELLs pricing politics always sturdled me, but this almost tops it. For a note, when my partner bought his computer he got five different offers (the same day) when browsing the DELL page. All setups where, in the end, exactly alike, but the prices differed between aprox. 1000 Euro and 1450 Euro - almost 50% difference for the same computer with all the same gimmicks. Okay, the more expensive offers did not include a DELL printer, which will go up on ebay at some point, but who cares ;-)

RSS Feed for my Delphi Developer Notes

2006-01-06T17:18:00.000+01:00

You might have read the comments from Lasse Jari Hansen asking for a RSS export of my blog. Sadly, blogger.com does not generate it automatically. Well, I took that as an excuse to not provide one, until now. As for the new "Welcome Page", which will arrive rather soon, it will handle both types, RSS and ATOM sources. But the current one out there does not. Now, if only one uses the RSS feed for my page, I will be more than happy. Because I have learned a little while preparing it, I do not really care either (sorry). It is an ASP.NET 2.0 application using the ATOM.NET assembly and the System.Xml namespace.

Get the RSS Feed of Delphi-Developer Notes

SnowCamp - The ASP.NET Knowledgetour

2006-01-06T11:08:00.000+01:00

This year, I am planing to visit the better-office SnowCamp 2006, a week full of lectures on ASP.NET 1.1 with Borland Developer Studio 2006 and Microsoft Visual Studio.

I am exited already, as I know I am going to meet some good friends there, again. First time this year that Daniel, Daniel and me (Daniel) get together again. Thomas "Mr. Rave" Pfister will be there, Jason Vokes is coming and other will be there too. So if you have time and if you believe there are yet things to learn in .NET come and join us from January 23rd through 27th. Just be aware that space is very limited - at a maximum there will be 20 "students", four "teachers" and two keynote speakers.

The whole event will be in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria, South Germany and snow is guaranteed at this time of the year. Full pension, hotel room, Lenovo (IBM) notebooks will be provided, etc. Come there and let's rock the .NET world. I am eager to finally dive deep into that matter and believe me: Danny is fun to listen too and he knows his stuff!

Websites powered by Delphi

2006-01-04T19:59:00.000+01:00

Well, today I want to present a website to you, that ultimately is powered by Borland Delphi. The version running on the system is based on version 7 of Borland Delphi. I am executing officer of a company which builds web-based content management systems, labeled Content ACE. The current version 4 release 3 fully supports Unicode and UTF-8. The system is build as a combination of DCOM objects, COM objects, ISAPI Filters, Windows NT service applications and a few more adminstrative applications.

The web site womensnet (targetting the European audience, especially German speaking folks) is a promotional web site of Henkel. womensnet has an active registered user base of about 150.000 users.

The system itself is running on ASP (not ASP.NET yet) and MS IIS 6.0 on a Microsoft Windows 2003 server with 1GB RAM, MS SQL Server and a P4 single CPU. It can handle up to 500 concurrent users easily and still has some room air left for more ;-)

Another web site, I already have mentioned in my blog is running on the same system. Currently though, I am preparing to move it to a new server, the old one (PIII, 256MB RAM) is a little sluggish and needs to get kicked.

For the coming quarter, I am planing to move our system to Borland Developer Studio 2006. First tests have shown a performance increase by 10 to 20 percent, so I am excited to see what will happen.

Built, Designed, Powered - Borland Developer Studio 2006

2005-12-29T18:04:00.000+01:00

So far, I have only seen images that display for one of the personalities, like Borland Delphi or Borland C++Builder. The best of those collections/arts can be found at Dragon Soft. However, I wanted to have some icons that can be displayed for the Product as whole, for the Borland Developer Studio 2006. So I created some. I am sure more will come. Download them, distribute them, use them, copy them as you like and help pushing the Borland Developer Studio out into this big world.

And do not forget, I like the original ones, it's just that they do not target the whole product yet.

Code Templates: Define the Cursor Position

2005-12-25T15:45:00.000+01:00

Today I was asked how you can define where the cursor will appear after the code template editing was done. Imagine a simple template, which only will add following code.

begin

end;

Now, you would like to position the cursor (shown as "|") as following after invoking the template.

begin
  |
end;

The XML template for that task is rather easy, let's say you have not defined any delimiter character, so the IDE will default to the dollar "$" sign. Then you would define the template like the following snippet.

  language="Delphi"
  context="methodbody">
$selected$$*$$end$
end;]]>

If you want to use another delimiter you can simple declare it with a delimiter attribute like the following code snippet will show.

  language="Delphi"
  context="methodbody"
  delimiter="|">
|selected||*||end|
end;]]>

I hope that this will help you in your endavours in creating new code templates.

An afterthougt: Why does that work and why do you need to write |selected||*||end|. Well, in my template I have setting surround="true". Why? Simply, you can select some code in your editor and call that template from the Surround -> context menu point.

The editor will now take the selected code and place it into the place designated by |selected||*||end|. If no code is selected, when you invoke the template, the IDE will simply put your cursor there, because it is the selection by itself. ;-)

Delphi Community Meeting Germany

2005-12-24T19:29:00.000+01:00

After this years success, we have planned the next Delphi Days (GE: Delphi Tage). The users of the three largest German speaking Delphi communities, as well as Delphi users from Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, and Austria are coming to Frankfurt on February 18th 2006.

Directly following the BASTA event, at the same location we will present you well known speakers who will bring you up-to-date on Delphi 2006. Jason Vokes (Borland UK) will come and talk about the future of Delphi, Daniel Magin and Bernd Ua (both Borland Germany) will show you the current version of Delphi 2006 with Together, Luca Giannone (share-it / Element 5) will talk about successful shareware marketing, David I (you know him) will talk via video conference, and Egwin Braganca (Borland Germany) will host a discussion.

A big lunch and coffee breaks will be served in between the sessions, a Q&A session will help you with your problems, and a raffle with many prices (Delphi versions, iPods, Books, ...) will guarantee you much fun.

Come and have fun. More information at the official site Delphi-Tage in German and at Borland EventCentral in English.

I hope to see you there :-)

Happy Holidays

2005-12-24T15:11:00.000+01:00

I just want to wish all of you happy holidays and a very successful new year.

DeskBands with Delphi

2005-12-18T20:46:00.000+01:00

Last week, Borland Germany has published my article on Creating DeskBands with Borland Delphi. The source code is available at Borland CodeCentral. Since all, comments in the sources as well as the article is in German I want to give you a few points here. Please forgive me for not translating the article in whole, yet.

What are DeskBands anyway
Well, most of you probably know the quick start bar which comes with Windows XP and/or Internet Explorer 5 to your older versions of Windows. Many of you will even know the way Media Player docks into that very same Windows task bar, or the Google Desktop Bar. All those are built using the same technology: DeskBands.

What do you need
Basically Delphi 4 would help for starting a project. The sample at CodeCentral us built with Delphi 2005. Further I do strongly recommend some virtual environment such as Virtual Machine or MS Virtual PC for testing. This is much faster than doing it on your development machine.

Frist Steps
Start a new ActiveX Project and add a Type Library to it. Now, we need to import the SHDocVw.dll into the project using the ActiveX Import Wizard. Our desk band needs to implement different interfaces, from the imported library as well as from the ActiveX unit.

IDeskBand
This interface is our main candidate. The implemented methods allow us to define our deskband, its title, size, kind, etc.

IPersist, IPersistStream
Those interfaces help us to save the state of the deskband between user sessions. Further does Windows only persist global information (like position, size) of the deskband when tohse interface are declared in our deskband.

IObjectWithSite
A lightweight protocol that allows us to integrate with a host container such as the Windows taskbar.

IContextMenu
I guess the name speaks for itself. It allows us to extend the default context menu.

IInputObject
Some user action, like using the tab key, we want to be handled just as other Windows deskbars do, therefore we need to override some default container behaviuor using the methods of IInputObject.

Installation and Removal
Deskbands are installed using the MS Windows regsvr32-Tool.
regsvr32.exe {Path to DLL}\DemoDeskBar.dll
Uninstalling goes similar using the /u switch.
regsvr32.exe /u {Path to DLL}\DemoDeskBar.dll

Usually you will have to reboot after uninstalling the DLL before you can delete/replace it.

Well, as said above, this will be a short overview only, but most of you will do fine looking at the sources ;-) So have fun and drop me a line if you feel like it.

RAVE for the Programmer

2005-12-17T18:41:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was great! Thomas Pfister, member of the Team Nevrona and one of the greatest experts on RAVE gave a lecture yesterday in Frankfurt. Planning, as I was told, took three years to get four people together (and two more, as it turned out in the end) for some technical meeting somewhere. Well, as mentioned above, it turned out to be in Frankfurt (as location) and on RAVE (as topic). While I have toyed with RAVE in the past and done some things with it, I was (okay, still am) far away from really understanding how RAVE worked. As I wrote before, once you start to understand what RAVE con give you, you will start to phathom the power off it.

Yesterday was "just another" of those experiences. I was, once again, baffeled by the power of it, and if you are going to believe Thomas, there is so much more you can do with RAVE... don't start dreaming, imagination wont last (in most cases anyway).

Now, as I am into web server programming often for intranet and extranet, I can hardly wait for RAVE for ASP.NET (best would be .NET 2.0 right now) to arrive. Giving the user the report he wants in all different formats (HTML, XML, PDF, ...) he could possibly need is just so easy. Cool!

Now, if I would be able to start working with RAVE... there you have a tool with a steep learning curve. So, if you need reporting, please try out RAVE, the time you invest to get started will repay with the first reports you are going to deploy and all those formats you can extract. And do not forget, there are many places where you get add-ons for RAVE to expand the power within it to yet another level.

Welcome Page Feature: Favo(u)rite Projects

2005-12-15T16:33:00.000+01:00

Hi, first off, the Welcome Page calls the "Favorites" as the American English does, not "Favourites" as in the British English. So let's see. I prepared four screen shots for you. The first shows the normal recent project detail page. Each project there has a link called Make me a Favorite.

Sorry, it will not boost your sales among your client base, but the link will disappear once you click. At least something ;-)

Well, the project detail page, I decided, will not be configurable, and therefore allways display the full information. However, since you usually know your favorite projects pretty well, the Favorite Page will not show all those details, but simply a list with each project and their last change date/time.

And, you can kick each favorites butt, by clicking on that [x] besides its name and it will not be a favorite any longer :-(

The length of your favorite list is limited by your computers power only (and yours in scrolling through it). I am still thinking about some auto-ordering, either by names, or last access. We'll see.

And, did you notice Athene in the back, yes she made it into the page. :)

A Video on Class Operators

2005-12-11T19:25:00.000+01:00

Today, Daniel R. Wolf has published a second video on Borland Developer Studio 2006. This version is about the new class operators, introduced to the Delphi Language. Usually examples for class operators are shown on complex numbers, but Daniel took an example much easier to follow without in-depth math knowledge: times.

The videos are in German available at the Delphi-PRAXiS Video Page.

FastMM, DLLs, and strings

2005-12-08T17:33:00.000+01:00

Funny, I just asked myself yesterday what I should do when creating a DLL which will share strings and/or dynamic arrays with the main application exe-file. Today, before I even had time to investigate that setting, look at the help, or even ask Pierre the same question came up in the Borland public non-tech news group.

The solution is simple (Pierre le Riche):

All you need to do is add SimpleShareMem.pas as the first unit in the .dpr
file of the exe as well as the dll (as you would have done with the old
sharemem.pas) and you can then safely share strings and dynamic arrays
between them. You don't need the borlndmm.dll if you use the SimpleShareMem
unit.

Good to know, thanks Pierre for answering before I have even asked you ;-)

Nothing is perfect, though we are getting close

2005-12-07T11:02:00.000+01:00

Today, I came back to my office computer running Borland Developer Studio 2006. Currently, I am working on a VCL application for Win32, since BMW still has not even allowed .NET 1.1 projects for deployment. Who is crying for .NET 2.0 needs to be here already? Well, I would like that too, but anyway, back to the topic.

When I started up Delphi 2006 this morning and loaded my current project into the IDE it automatically loaded one of the forms. Okay, good so far, but where did all those non-visual components go?

on the verge of panic, it is the RTM release I have installed, I clicked with my mouse into the form and "hey!" there they were.

I have heard of this problem before, but never have seen it myself. So here I am, even being able to reproduce it with my project. So, I'll pack it up and will be going to QC it in the coming days.

Huw Collingbourne on Delphi 2006 and .NET

2005-12-06T14:39:00.000+01:00

Today, Ryan McGinty uploaded a link an interesting article on a debate on .NET in the public Borland Delphi news groups. Huw Collingbourne said the following about the new release of the Borland Developer Studio 2006.

I agree with you to a large extent - the editing and debugging environment of Visual Studio is excellent. The debugging tools in particular are much better even than those in my beloved Delphi. However, speaking of Delphi… I wonder if Borland now has a realistic opportunity to offer competition to Microsoft? With the new release of the Borland Developer Studio, you’ll have the option of coding in C++ for Win32, C# for .NET and Delphi for .NET (Win Forms). Moreover, Borland has a powerful class library (VCL) that works pretty well on both Win32 and .NET. That’s why some VB developers are looking to Delphi as a serious alternative. Unlike VB, which commits you either to Win32 (VB6 and its predecessors) or .NET (VB .NET), a Delphi Win32 VCL application can be recompiled for .NET with few (or if you are careful, with no) modifications to the source code. In principle it seems to me that Borland’s .NET solution is essentially better than Microsoft’s.

Now, that let's one hope for great times to come, doesn't it?

Videos on Borland Developer Studio

2005-12-05T22:27:00.001+01:00

Daniel R. Wolf has started publishing Flash Videos on Borland Developer Studio 2006. He will probably concentrate on the Borland Delphi 2006 personalities. His first video is a 10 minute introduction to some of the new features awaiting you.

Watch them at the Delphi-PRAXiS (German narrations though).

Good stuff, check back in the next weeks for more videos to come.

More on creating Live-Coding Templates

2005-12-05T17:40:00.000+01:00

This time I will not show you a fancy Live-Coding Template, but want to let you in on what types you can use for them and how to do that.

Actually, it is rather simple to create new templates. In the View menu of Borland Delphi 2006, chose the Template entry. Right click in that window and select New from the context menu. Now note that you got a new XML file, itself controlled by a Live-Coding Template. Nice touch ;-)

First you need to enter a name for the template, which needs to be unique within the language you want that template working for. Using [tab] you come to the description node, the author node, and the language attribute. For a list of all languages supported, see below. You should add an attribute "delimiter" and set its value to "|", or any delimiter you want to use.

In the CDATA node, you add the code, which you want to be inserted when invoking this template. All synchronization points should be surrounded using that6 defined delimiter. For each synchronization point (note: you can use the same multiple times in the code, thus synchronizing them automatically as the user types) you must add a node which should contain a node with the default value and a node with a hint shown to the user.

A sample for CSS nodes can be downloaded from here, helping you to automatically insert the CSS attributes for scrollbar-manipulation in IE-based browsers. Save that into your local application folder of your profile -> Borland\BDS\4.0\code_templates. (Just a simple sample, but you can come up with much better ones for yourself, I am sure.)

The list of Live-Coding Templates supported can be found in the CodeTemplateAPI.pas file of your Borland Developer Studio 2006 installation.

CSharp
VB
Jsharp
HTML
XML
Delphi
C
IDE
SQL
IDL
JavaScript
CSS
INI
PHP

Have fun and put your Live-Coding Templates online at Borlands CodeCentral for everyone.

Video Preview for the Community Welcome Page

2005-12-04T17:51:00.000+01:00

As promised, with the launch of the Borland Developer Studio 2006 I am going to launch a second Welcome Page, as Community Release. Sadly, as the time of the Quality Assurance Team was very limited for the Welcome Page. That is why we are preparing a Welcome Page as Community Release.

It will take a little longer until you can actually download it, however, here I want to present the current features to you. This way you may actually have some more ideas on what you would like to see.

The video shows you the following areas:

Project view with detailed information about each recently opened project / project group
Newsfeed selection
Newsfeed summary view of all cached feeds
Integration of the BDN BabelCode service, which translates C# source code to Delphi.NET source code

Get a first look with this Camtasia Flash Video.

Creating a Script Template Engine for the Borland Developer Studio 2006

2005-12-03T18:14:00.000+01:00

As you might already know, the new version of the Borland Developer Studio has "live templates," that allow you to get many coding tasks easily done. The react either automatically or manually at special keywords and fill in the gaps for you. Further, those live templates are completely done in XML and thus can be changed rather easily. Further, you can add scripts to those templates allowing you to invoke code completion, refactoring among many other feature of the IDE.

However, you can even write your very own template scripting engine, allowing you to further expand the power of those code templates. Thanks to Adam "Sparky" Markowitz, I have just done that. The source code can be downloaded at CodeCentral ID 23866. I will not indulge to much on the how-to here, as the source code comes with a readme and is fully commented.

Let's first take a look at what I have done. When the user enters "search" in the code editor and presses [Tab] or [Ctrl+J], the live template will be invoked automatically and tell him to enter the keywords to search for.

Now, the user can enter his search keywords. Once he (or she) presses tab to leave the syncronization point, a script will be called which invokes my new template scripting engine and it will start an online search in the users default browser.

The template scripting engine can be accessed through the new IOTACodeTemplateScriptEngine interface, defined in the CodeTemplateAPI.pas file, which is in your sources folder of your Delphi 2006 installation. The whole source is online at Borlands CodeCentral (see link above). Below you can see the XML template (click for a larger view).

Closing the Editor Tabs in BDS 2006

2005-12-03T14:04:00.000+01:00

Developers who have used Borland Delphi 2005 will remember that little [x] on each tab, which allowed you to close each tab rather easily using the mouse. Some will be wondering where that has gone in the Borland Developer Studio 2006. Well, simply it's gone, however, you have another way, imo better way, to close them. Just as you know it from FireFox and other tabbed browser, click with your middle mouse button, or the mouse whell, on any editor tab you want to close, and it will be closed.

On the right of your tab row, you can see up to four square buttons. The and the button allow you to scroll horizontally through the list of the tabs opened. The button will open a list of all opened tabs. Select any item, which you want to see and the code editor will focus on it. The last button will close the currently shown editor window.