Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Missed a part of the marathon? no worries!

Go here to listen to previous parts of the marathon so far.

24 HOURS OF DELPHI! - GOING GREAT SO FAR!!

This is a picture of the "recording" studio of the 24 hour marathon.

:) DavidI is doing a great job staying up for soooo loooong.

Keep the good work!!

remember get into it at: http://bdn.borland.com

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Sunday, July 10, 2005

24 Hours of Delphi -- July 13!!

Well, there are already several blogs talking about this, but we need to make enough noise cause it's an event that you can NOT miss.

The day July 13th, 2005.

This link will give you a complete schedule of activities and the different starting time in different time zones.

I am planning most of the day, specially interested on the Delphi Road maps, and migration stories. So, see you guys there. ;)

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

ECO II Resources...

I will try to add more links about ECO when i found them, but, this compilation should be enough to have anyone moving forward on the "lovely" world of ECO.

Borland:
Borland's Web Page
Borland's Developer Network: Make things fast with ECO II (video)
Borland's Developer Network: Create an ECO Space from an existing Database.
Borland's ECO Wikki

Third parties:
Creating a Blog with ECO.
How to do Things: ECO.
(The entire HowToDo site is built with ECO)

ECO related Blogs:
Malcom Groves
Jonas Hogstrom (Borland)
Jesper Hogtrom (Borland)
(i will suspect they are brothers eh?)
Peter Morris

Newsgroups:
Borland

If you find more, please add comments with their URLs , so other people can use them.

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

ECO II Conference - How was it?

Well, people, there are things that you heard about, but you dont buy it, or you may believe it but you dont think they can be that good, UNTIL the moment you see it.

Well, ECO II is that. The next great thing in Rapid Application Development, in a matter of minutes with a few clicks we had a nice small application with database, GUI, Business logic, etc running without writing a single line of code. Nope, not even 1.

If you know how to do boxes and lines (UML design), thats it! you are on it. It really makes you think of all what you have done all these years :(.

I mean it, it is AWESOME, if you have not seen it go here and get an idea of it. IT'S WORTH IT!

The conference was great, John gave a good overview of D2005. We got a small taste of Dexter (D2006), the compact framework and finally some nice refactoring to keep us happy.

Two lucky participants got D2005 to take home courtesy of Borland Canada. I got a marker :)

Finally, let me thank the Toronto Delphi Users Group, you guys are doing a fantastic job, thank you John for bring up all the goodies and keep us smiling with Delphi and Thank you Borland Canada to support us.

Saturday, May 28, 2005

ECO II Conference - Toronto

The Borlander John Kaster will be here in T.O. giving us a very welcome and needed conference about ECO II. The day, June 6th, location, so far looks like the North York Library as initially planned. For more information visit the Toronto's Delphi Users Group.

I expect a good assistance to this meeting, so, see you all there.

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Ad Hoc SQL vs Stored Procedures

Well, i had the pleasure to assist to a Michael Li's conference about Security using ASP.Net in Delphi 2005.

One of the topics was the famous "SQL Injection" menace. I felt bad initially cause i use Ad Hoc SQL on my everyday, is extremely versatile, and you can build great search queries at run time. More static operations like reporting, specific updates and very plain searchs on tables are usually perfect places for stored procedures.

Maybe a difference is that i use parameterized ad Hoc sql, never pure text insertion (eg. "select * from users where id = '+id.text+'"), but i must admit that for user validation procedures i use stored procs.

I think that for abstraction of tables in a program, there is nothing better than ad Hoc, I never considered appropiate to have hundreds of sps to manage every single update. Constant changing databases will prove to be a hell for the hundreds of sps that depends from that table that you just changed.

Well, after that conference, i decided to do a little research about this topic and i found a great "good and bad" discussion about it.

Check it here at the Server Side, it brings some light to both sides of the discussion.

Good to read, enjoy.


Pst. btw, I will keep using my ad hoc queries. :)

Friday, May 13, 2005

New delphi Book coming...

The new Marco CantĂș's book "Mastering 2005" will be available in stores this coming June.

You can pre order it here!

Based on its content table, it promises to be a great addition to the Delphi library.

Enjoy.

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Help improving Delphi!!!

Please take some of your time and fill up this survey.

Its a very well done poll, and will definitly help improving the product. Make some time and go for it!.

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Microsoft feeling the pressure?

I don't hate MS, i really dont. But i support any other software company that gives a different flavor of what we already get from MS.

I love google, and they are doing great against msn search. I love Borland, and they have their ups and downs, but they havent let me down with Delphi. The last example on this, is Linux adoption by goverments.

I found this interesting article about the topic. Enjoy.

Friday, April 15, 2005

Negotiating a contract...

The first time i had a contract job, my contractor practially abused me. :P

Long nights, lots of work. Low money.

After that point, i get sharper when the time for negotiation comes. One guy in the Borland forums post a nice article that talks about the matter, and give TIPs on how to deal with this situations.

I wished i read that before. :P

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Necessity in Software Design.

I found this very interesting post about what drive us to make decisions.

A the end of the post they applied it to Software design, i like specially the phrase "they have specific goals and will do only the absolute minimum necessary to achieve those goals" when talking about the users behaviour while making a decision.

Sometimes we try to provide all the possible options, and we design with this concept in mind, thinking that it will make our software more complete, at the end, offering all those options waste our development time and they may never be used.




Wednesday, April 06, 2005

We are moving up!!

Based on this ranking Delphi is going up in popularity, usually its ranked in 10th and 9th, but in the last months is going up.

I think it's time for those abandom Classic VB to move to Delphi where backwards compatibility matters!!.

Oh thinking about that, i found this interesting guide about migrating Visual Source Safe projects to StarTeam. A good option if you get the Architect / Enterprise version of Delphi that includes a StarTeam license.

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Games made in Delphi. COOL STUFF!!

Age of Wonders is made in Delphi.

Want more?, take a look at the finalist from the Delphi Developers Gaming community competition this year.

Click here and start playing

ASP.Net security conference in the TDUG group

Hi people,

Yesterday i went to the TDUG (Toronto Delphi Users Group) meeting, we were initially expecting the visit of John Kaster but, due to out of control personal reasons, he couldn't attend and we had the "just on time" assistance of Michael Li (Management Consultant from Infocan)

Michael gave us an interesting conference about asp.net security, running off course on lovely Delphi 2005. Most of the issues brought up were already known by many, but, it was always interesting to see how all the people (me included) did a mental check of their own projects to see if we were commiting one of the security flaws that Michael was explaining to us. Usually, a simple smile, or a gesture let the rest know the insides of a typical problem in our code (some people just said, 'oh f@ck! i do that).

Anyway it was interesting, the additional info about Michael's scuba shark experiences were also great (supported by video). Finally, Borland Canada was also kind enough to give away a Borland Delphi 2005 architecht version and some cool tshirts. (i do like the tshirts, i love going with those "become a development super hero, use Delphi 2005" to some MS events, really i do :) ).

But hey! now i have a cool blue desk clock courtesy of Borland which i already have on top of my monitor. :D

Thank you guys! good stuff.

And keep up the good work TDUG group.!!

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

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...