Monday, March 21, 2005

Development methodologies... Agile Development

Well, i'm a hard core developer, but lately, im getting more and more interested on how to enhance and improve the software development process (ALM, SDO anyone?).

I found a good piece of web literature that you guys may want to read whenever you have some time available, its about Agile Development.

Here is the piece.

Enjoy.

Thursday, March 17, 2005

John Kaster in Toronto!

Hey people! John Kaster from Borland will be here! April 4th!

He's one of the minds behind DataSnap (Midas), he will be demoing ECO II development in Delphi.

Visit this website to get more information:

Toronto Delphi Users Group

Pst. ECO II is basicaly a way to program using UML designs that comes in Delphi 2005. From a UML design it generates DB, GUI and the interaction between.

Friday, March 11, 2005

ASPPRO.Net Readers Choice Awards

Well, after this heads up by Nick Hodges, i did my duty of letting them now their mistake.

They had a quick and good response. Delphi is on the list, go and vote now!!


Pst. They are missing Rave as reporting tool, some people emailed them plz.

Monday, March 07, 2005

Costa Rica VoIP in the news....

Well, i'm from Costa Rica, my beautiful and peaceful country...

But, yup, we do make some stone age decisions... like this one that may happen if we dont wake those ICE guys up.

VoIp may become a crime in CR

Biggest LCD TV.. so far.

Hi guys, another non Delphi related post.

This is the biggest LCD Tv made so far.

Remember its LCD, Plasma is a different technology and we do have Plasma TVs that big.

Sunday, February 27, 2005

Moving time...

Gosh, i hate moving... its one of those things that you are forced to do and you hate it, but simply you have to do it.

This is the 9th time in my life that im moving, i know it sounds like a bad record, but usually its an upgrade. This time, its basically same apartment size, same facilities, same everything, simply a better deal on the long term.

I spent lots on furniture, mostly from this place IKEA. Amazing place, specially the AS-IS section, if you have the chance to go, visit it. European furniture with low prices and great quality if you know how to pick.

Some of the secrets behind the low price is that you need to assemble the furniture yourself. The packing and instructions are great, so, its just a matter of patience and a good back and you will do fine.

Tomorrow is my last day on my current apartment, i lived here for two years, it gave me amazing memories, but now its time to move on. Lets get ready for what is coming on the next one.

Talk to you soon people.

Monday, February 14, 2005

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DELPHI!! 1O YEARS AND COUNTING!!!

There are thingspersonal and professional that change your life.

I must admit that Delphi changed my professional life. Programming never resulted more fun than it is thanks to it.

Thanks Borland, thanks Delphi. 10 years of joy!!

Thanks Anders Hjelsberg, Gary Whizin, and Zack Urlocker for the initial push, and now thank you to all the people that is still on board, old and new guys that keep this amazing thing going on.

Danny, Allen, everybody there... thanks. Keep the good work.

as someone says "Go Delphi Go!"

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

SQL Day...

Well, right now im trying to finish an Archiving application for our ever growing customers databases.

I spent hours and hours on the Query Analyzer and the Enterprise Manager, and finally i think i got it all done. Now im trying to add some reports to it, but, it seems that my good Rave is giving me problems. A "Duplicate License" on the system, i think it maybe caused due to the fact that Rave comes with Delphi, but also we bought the license version of it.

I will confirm that later, but so far, the app looks great. Another step further to more professional applications.


Friday, February 04, 2005

Simply OMG!! The most amazing animal you can imagine!!

Well, i dont think communication should be an issue for mankind if this guy can do it, so do we right?

The Amazing Parrot

Nice review!

Hey, my friend Roberto mentioned something very simple and fairly straight smart.

There is some people out there that actually are not that informed about what's new on Delphi 2005. So:

This is a good review to read.

Hey, dont like long movies... get a quick 30 seconds recap of it. :)

LOL, extremly funny, love those bunnies.

Watch Titanic, Alien, etc. in 30 seconds!

Cheers!




Tuesday, January 25, 2005

This is not Delphi related but, its worth it...

My friend Zoster finished his last song, no he doesnt sing, and if he does, im 100% sure he sucks at it, hes one of those techno, rave, etc computer composer. I can tell, his stuff is good.

Download his latest hit here!


VCL and .Net... VCL.NET The best of both worlds.

I was trying to find out what can i do to keep going with all my knowledge on the VCL, and also add some of the good ideas that .net can offer.

With the VCL and Win32 it was always like that, we use WIN32 when there were things that Microsoft actually did right, but for the rest, we depend on our mighty VCL.

Well, the VCL survived win16, Win32, Kylix and now .NET. The answer, VCL.NET

Read this great article from the guy who help porting it to its new generation.

Why VCL.NET?

Guest Star Forum appearance

I had the pleasure of attend to a Delphi 2005 Conference, among the speakers we had Danny Thorpe, Chief Scientist of Borland one (for not saying THE one) of the brains behind the Delphi Compiler.

It was extremly interesting to hear him talk, we as normal people, will use everyday expressions to explain our ideas, hearing him talk was the same thing but with tokens, one-time parsers, constants and variables, his entire way of talking was simply extremly analitical.

In my opinion of of the smartest guys i've ever met.

Here is a brief guest appearance he had talking about the Delphi Compiler:

Danny Thorpe clears out the dust around the Delphi compiler.

Thursday, January 20, 2005

COM+ Wars...

Ok, so basically i have a set of Com+ that have to work on win2000 and another set of COM+ that have to work on Win2003.

The migration wasn't as bad as i tought, i encounter some basic problems due to security restrictions that windows 2003 by default adds to almost any network communication.

So for all of you guys that use DataSnap on a COM+ (Transactional Modules) in 2000 and want to "upgrade" it to 2003, this articles will help you.

1. How To Enable Network COM+ Access in Windows Server 2003.


Then i start getting this nice error message while starting my apps:

"New transaction cannot enlist in the specified transaction coordinator."


So far so good, LAN side is covered. What about ISAPIs in IIS 6.0?

It was kind of simple actually:

1. Click "Allow unknown ISAPI extensions" in your web extension option in the IIS.
2. And, i dont know why, i create/write/read a log file that is created inside the System32\LogFiles directory. Doesn't matter how many permissions i gave, or how many times i tried to reset it. It never allowed me to write data on it anymore. The problem was solved when i moved the location of the file to any other directory in the computer.

Well, that was it. So far the way to D2005 and Win2003 is looking good.





Tuesday, January 18, 2005

What i do...

Ok, basically, i deal with one of the people's favorite sins. Gambling.

I do Casino and Sports Book wagering software.

It's a very fascinating industry and i can tell you hundreds of adventure around this business... but oh well, i can post some other day about that.

In the meanwhile, today im fighting with some integration with our casino software, which works with win2000, as i mentioned before, my servers are in win2003, so its a good step to check compatibility and any other issues between these 2 guys and how com+ works from one to another.


So far so good... i will keep you posted.

Oh, if you have Rave 6 license, DONT install it on your D2005. I uninstall the Rave set that came on my D2005 (version 6) to upgrade to my registered version 6.2. Big mistake, newer version yes, but i lost my .Net reporting capabilities, reason?

Well, it seems that in the near future, whoever had a license over Rave 6, will need to upgrade to a new license to .Net, because we will be able to download only the Rave 6 upgrades intended to Win32 development, .Net will be some other issue ($$$).

Not totally sure about this, but looks like it.

k, bye!

Thursday, January 13, 2005

New year, new development.

There is nothing like starting a new year, than starting with fresh mentality and FRESH SOFTWARE. Yup, SQL server formatted, and upgraded from 2000 to 2003 (finally). Application Servers to 2003, and my dev computer to XP with the IT terror service pack 2.

Delphi 5 in (aghh, dont tell me), Delphi 7 in (oh yeah!), Delphi 2005 in. (IT ROX!!)

Yup, we develop in the three of them, reason for not upgrading... components. Im stuck with a set of components in Delphi 5. Too expensive (thats what they say) to go for the 7 version at least.

New INDY components, version 10, (it actually gave me some trouble installing it on D5), and new Rave 6.

So far so good, final step will be to try to compile our code, fingers cross, as usual it should never work on the first run, else we are in trouble.

cya.

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Welcome to my Blog!

Well, this is my first attempt on having a blog.

Main topic, my favorite programming language DELPHI!!!

Specially now that we have Delphi 2005.

I hope to start posting soon.



A painless self-hosted Git service

Remember how a part of my NAS setup was to host my own Git server? Well that forced me to review options and I stumble into Gitea .  A extr...