Delphi Developer job offer in NJ?

I saw this add from "The Lair of the Pythia" blog, so I will help spreading the word.

Delphi Job opening here!

So go there and make us all proud!

The Phone interview process...

Well,

One of the different roles that job after job I've done is interviewing new candidates for my team.

I'm very comfortable with the one-on-one, mano a mano model of interviewing, but most recently I'm dealing with a new cool variant of it, the phone screening, why is it new? well, usually that kind of process is managed by the HR people, but now days, based on the offer/demand sometimes is healthy to screen a guy before he even puts a foot out of his home.

Oh God, yes, distortion on the communication line, language barriers, unable to read body language, unable to picture your world into mine, unable to cross that border of understanding and agreement, indeed, it is a bit more difficult than my original play field.

I know that practice will make the difference for me, but also, I was lucky enough to get this link from a co-worker that it is going through the same process.

READ IT! if your duties involved phone screening, it may help you to understand the situation and save you from the confusion we noobs need to go through at the beginning.

Code Rage 2007!!! NOW!!

Guys, more than 20 online conferences covering from powerful Delphi to Java, Ruby, Php, Interbase and lots more!

Its free, its cool and its from the best developer tools company WHAT ELSE YOU WANT!!!

GO HERE NOW AND REGISTER! Starts today March 12th! 6:30AM PST!!

10 basic principles of SOA

Lately, all my work is around implementing solutions following a SOA approach. After working for several years with multiple software vendors on my industry, and having to deal with endless integrations, I'm ending up aiming my tools and goals to it.

This is a nice little article about 10 things to consider while following a SOA mentality.

The ADO prepared property.

Today I was playing with some ADO queries and I stumble one more time with the famous prepared property. Based on the BDS help it says:

Description Set Prepared before calling the Open method to specify whether ADO prepares the command used to create the dataset’s recordset. If Prepared is set to true and the dataset component is connected to a data store, ADO prepares the command before executing it. If Prepared is set to false, ADO does not prepare the command. The default value of Prepared is false.

Now, after a bit of research I found this interesting article on the msn dev network.

The important part is here:

Prepared property

In theory, the Prepared property was designed to reduce work on the server by pre-compiling ad hoc queries so subsequent executions would use a temporary stored procedure instead of repeating the compile phase each time the query is executed. However, this is not the case with ADO's implementation—keep reading.

Since ODBC was invented some years ago, SQL Server has gotten much smarter—it now knows how to leverage existing (in cache) compiled query plans. That is, once you execute a query from ADO (or by any means), SQL Server constructs a query plan, saves it in the procedure cache, and executes it. When the query is done, SQL Server marks the query plan as "discardable" but leaves it in memory as long as it can. When another identical (or close-enough) query comes in, which is very likely in systems running multiple clients, SQL Server simply re-uses the cached plan. This saves a significant amount of time and greatly improves scalability. It makes SQL Server actually run faster as more users are added, assuming they're doing about the same things with the same set of queries.

ADO and its ODBC and OLE DB data providers know about this strategy, and in most cases they execute sp_executesql to take advantage of this feature. However, this puts the Prepared property in a quandary. It insists on creating temporary stored procedures, but the data providers insist on using sp_executesql. The result? Chaos. I describe what happens a little later when executing Command objects is discussed.

My recommendation for the Prepared property: forget it—at least for SQL Server. For other providers, set up a trace that shows exactly what's going on—what the server is being asked to do.

Now this is extremely interesting for me, specially the sp_executesql part, DataSnap indeed wraps every call in a "sp_executesql" so we are good there, now about using the prepared property, I will do more research on it, but for now, I will leave it alone. :P

Code Rage 2007!!!

Go to the virtual conference from CodeGear called CodeRage 2007.

It includes Delphi, Java, Php and even Ruby sessions with an All-Star set of speakers.

For more information go here!

Now, I think that everybody knows about it, but just in case...



Delphi 2007 for Win32 is available now! and in a well expected move, the new Delphi for Php makes his debut. A visual IDE for PHP using the same VCL structure that we all know and learn to love.

More Delphi News!!

Wow the information is in pieces everywhere.. check the following segments of "information" said by Michael Swindell (Delphi VP - CodeGear) that appeared on the borland newgroups:

"
c) Delphi Product line - we are realigning development plans and approaches
to focus on the individual native code Win32 editions (Pro/Ent) of the
products first, then fold them into an updated Studio that will include the
.NET updates. Architect and Turbo's would fall out of the Studio releases.
The Turbo's eds will become more lightweight in the process as well. The
majority of Delphi (and C++Builder) developers are focused on native code
development - so we are aligning our releases and timeframes accordingly.
Moving everything into monolithic Studio releases had some positive effects
but also some drawbacks that came thru in customer feedback. Having to wait
for the "all personalities" was not ideal for C++ and Delphi native
developers, who had either no or minimal interest or need for .NET. It
spread attention more thinly across the products, so we are changing the
approach so that during the year Delphi native developers have focused
specific attention in a product release, same with C++ developers, and .NET
developers. This approach actually worked quite well in past lives with
Delphi and C++Builder - although the complaint years ago from C++Builder
developers was that they had to wait 6mo to a year for the latest Delphi
features... which is something that we aim not to fall into. "

Then in addtion pay attention to the new "ALL DELPHI" intention with the new pricing model and SKU's:

"
Turbo Delphi Explorer -> Turbo Delphi "better" -> Delphi Pro -> Delphi Ent

same as above for C++

then Studio Pro/Ent/Arch incl both C++ and Delphi and .NET and Win32

Turbo Pro New and Delphi Pro Upgrades similar price level. So it will be
recommended in order to keep the feature level go to Delphi Pro as the
upgrade. This is a tuning of the editions. We released the Turbos with the
intention that we would see what worked and what didn't and make some
changes in 2007 to improve.

> How is this going to be handled?
> Or is the "lightweight" reference to reduced resource demands rather
> than reduced features?

lighter weight - in features and resource and download image

in general we have 12yrs of sku's editions pricing for Win32, .NET, Pascal,
C++, Linux, and more to work out the best "model" that cleans things up, and
focuses our energy (development, packaging, and marketing) on the things
that are most important to existing customers and enables us to put Delphi
into more developers hands than ever. So there will be some things that we
do that will seem like we're undoing something we've done or said
previously, or changing a position on something previously stated or
published. Some things will probably seem crazy or sacrilege, but we plan to
grow Delphi, and to do that requires a little bit of house cleaning and
tuning. We'll probably make a few mistakes in the process, but the goal is
long term. Delphi and C++Builder have helped millions of developers, we
think the Delphi way of developing can benefit millions more developers -
and we want to bring the Delphi ideas and approach to everyone we can. The
CodeGear difference is that we're going to take some risks and try new
things, but we won't be doing it at the expense of our customers. "

It is expected a Delphi release by the end of March maximum!.

Delphi 2006 new RollUp fix !

Already! more good news!

New Delphi hot fix rollup:

Here!

It fixes the following issues (long):


Version 10.0.2558.35231

===============================================================================

BDS2006 Update 2 Hotfix 10a

This Hotfix applies to:

Product: Borland Developer Studio
Version: 2006
Update level: Update 2
Editions: Professional, Enterprise, Architect, Turbo
Languages: English, German, French, Japanese


Description of updates that are included in this hotfix:

This hotfix contains a fix for the source code editor. If the source
code contained
accented or international characters, viewing the code as text and then
returning to
the file format would erroneously reset the source code to default ANSI,
thereby losing
the accented or international characters.

The source code (.pas) might become corrupt, especially if the source
code was
larger than 64K and if the accented or international characters occurred
only after
the intial 64K.

Quality Central Tracking Number(s): 32936, 32844
Internal Tracking Number(s): 241502, 241552

Copyright 2006, Borland Software Corporation. All rights reserved.

===============================================================================

BDS2006 Update 2 Hotfix 10b

This Hotfix applies to:

Product: Borland Developer Studio
Version: 2006
Update level: Update 2
Editions: Professional, Enterprise, Architect, Turbo
Languages: English, German, French, Japanese


Description of updates that are included in this hotfix:

This fix incorporates the following enhancements and fixes:

- The enhancement suggested in QC Report # 26063 to improve the SOAP
deserialization of multiref objects and arrays.

- The WSDL importer now exposes elements with 'maxOccurs="unbounded"'
as arrays and the SOAP runtime handles the conversion to and from XML.
(QC #35512)

- TXSDateTime (and other TXSxxxx types) can now be serialized as XML
attributes (QC #10969)

- The WSDL importer now handles schemas included or imported by the
schema
embedded within a WSDL.

- An uninitialized TXSDateTime will default to the value of
"0001-01-01T00:00:00" instead of
"1899-12-30T00:00:00.000".

- The WSDL published by Delphi applications was updated to be more
compliant with
the style expected by WSDL2Java importers.

- The SOAP runtime properly restores enumerated identifiers that were
renamed
because of conflicts with Delphi keywords or directives.

Quality Central Tracking Number(s): QC #26063, QC #33512, QC #10969
Internal Tracking Number(s): RAID #241798, #241801, #242796

Copyright 2006, Borland Software Corporation. All rights reserved.

===============================================================================

BDS2006 Update 2 Hotfix 10c

This Hotfix applies to:

Product: Borland Developer Studio
Version: 2006
Update level: Update 2
Editions: Professional, Enterprise, Architect, Turbo
Languages: English, German, French, Japanese


Description of updates that are included in this hotfix:

Removes the length limitation on search paths. Specifying a large
number of deeply
nested directories could exceed an internal limit.


Internal Tracking Number(s): RAID #242012

Copyright 2006, Borland Software Corporation. All rights reserved.


===============================================================================

BDS2006 Update 2 Hotfix 10d

This Hotfix applies to:

Product: Borland Developer Studio
Version: 2006
Update level: Update 2
Editions: Professional, Enterprise, Architect, Turbo
Languages: English, German, French, Japanese


Description of updates that are included in this hotfix:

This hotfix addresses the issue of Korean characters in the code editor
initiating
unwanted cold folding and causing access violations.

Quality Central Tracking Number(s): 35357
Internal Tracking Number(s): 242562

Copyright 2006, Borland Software Corporation. All rights reserved.


===============================================================================

BDS2006 Update 2 Hotfix 10e

This Hotfix applies to:

Product: Borland Developer Studio
Version: 2006
Update level: Update 2
Editions: Professional, Enterprise, Architect, Turbo
Languages: English, German, French, Japanese


Description of updates that are included in this hotfix:

This hotfix contains a fix for the VCL form designer to allow the F1
help key
to query the help system for the selected component.

Copyright 2006, Borland Software Corporation. All rights reserved.


===============================================================================

BDS2006 Update 2 Hotfix 10f

This Hotfix applies to:

Product: Borland Developer Studio
Version: 2006
Update level: Update 2
Editions: Professional, Enterprise, Architect, Turbo
Languages: English, German, French, Japanese


Description of updates that are included in this hotfix:

This fix enables all COM\ActiveX menu items and wizards that are in the
Pro version of Delphi.

Copyright 2006, Borland Software Corporation. All rights reserved.

Happy Birthday Delphi!! woo hoo

Today is a big day! Delphi's bday.

Yup, 12 years ago Delphi came up to the market, the coolest and greatest development language on earth came to our lives.

You will see lots of posts on the newgroups and on popular blogs about this, you can read about Delphi Spacely and Delphi Astro, Delphi expansions into Vista and Ajax :).

I will be adding links that talk about the celebration on this post during the day, so there ya go:

Marco Cantú

A new jmission!!

Well, lots of changes lately, so I haven't being able to blog for a bit.

So, let me fix that.

First, I am now living in Vancouver, yup, work takes you everywhere so now I'm on a mission to make a successful company even more successful.

I'm working again with the mighty Java during the day and during the night as usual on the super powerful Delphi. I'm working lately a lot with 3 different middle tier framework architectures, on the java side, JBoss, on the Delphi side with KbmMW and RemObjects SDK.

It is extremely interesting to see how the concepts of each of those frameworks just repeat themselves on each platform. I still cant understand why things are so not friendly on the Java side, all the functionality is there but there is a huge gap to present things in an easy way to the user.

I like Delphi cause it allows you to easily jump into something and slowly depending on your needs you can look under the hood and get into the complexity of it. Java (Eclipse, even with lots of plug ins) stills presents a very aggressive learning curve. I'm pretty sure the results at the end are fantastic, but still always seems like things are being done the hard way.

There is a big standardization thanks to Sun, XML is everywhere, but is because of those that presenting all these standards to the eye of the developer is still as plain as a text file.

Today I asked a couple of java guys what were the plug ins or they use to develop their methods and other interfaces on JBoss remote services, the answer: we don't, we go into plain code.

No service builder, no nice drop and use components.

I think that is ok, but, I'm aware their are plug ins that make your life easier (Lamboz-JBoss), but at the end of the day the java guys remain like their Linux counterparts, completely old schoolers. They produce great pieces of software but the productivity level is in my opinion low. Two companies and large teams behind their products had showed me this.

My goal is to become good in Java and try to find all the required tools to get as close as I can to the speed of development of Delphi, will I be able to achieve this, maybe not, but it will certainly be interesting to try.

Anyway, I am using a great mix of RemObjects and KbMmW.

I am behind a new idea that I want to implement on the kind of platforms I develop. RemObjects is very easy to use, and provides a great DataSnap integration pack, it is completely object oriented and their plug in system to attach different channels and message packages formats is done in the RAD way, meaning its as visual as it can be. Now, KbMmw presents the fastest memory table in town, plus it shows a great maturity in their framework (Kim has years behind this baby, so, experience talks).

Having licenses for both and using their high points is helping me to build a super scalable beast. I hope to see and post the results soon.

In the meanwhile see ya all later.

Javing my way....

Again, I'm working on the interesting world of Java. Last time i play on the gray side of the moon was 1.3 years ago. On that opportunity Java -> WebLogic -> Oracle was the recipe for sucess (after Delphi obviously ;)).

Now, it is Java -> JBoss -> DB2, ja! nice combo, that could bring up some fatality moves and maybe even a famous friendship key combo. My experience with DB2 is close to zero, but should be similar to Oracle, and JBoss, so far it looks too similar to WebLogic, too soon to tell but we will see.

So back to the topic, lately I've being programming on Javita, and really, it is a nice language, sometimes gets into the same cryptic style as C but in general is acceptable. I have one basic complain so far.

The "switch" statement, requires a "break" line, that sounds to me like a forced move, close to a "goto" kind of move, if we are analyzing different cases, as soon as you found the matching one, you should just continue the execution out of the switch statement, but nope. The guy just goes all the way down if it is not stopped by a nice break. Easy to fix, great, but it caught my attention.

Well, thats it, on a lighter note, we had nice encouraging numbers on TIOBE, increased D popularity up one rank, but not enough to take over the crown of Ruby as the language of the year.

Oh lots of promotions on Turbo Delphis and components all over the world, some of them as down as $200USD for TPro.

Oh, I am still missing a nice post with my experiences with Subversion, it simply rox, really guys, want to use a source control software!, use Subversion. :)

Back to work!.

I did it again!

I must admit that it was on my plans, really, I was going to buy those components sooner or later, but while browsing on the CodeGear general third party components newsgroup I found an offer i couldn't resist. What was it? well, go into the website or in to the newsgroups and find out, it will be easy to just provide the link eh?

So on the mighty Christmas spirit I bought another fine set of tools for my ongoing home project.

The lucky ones are a set of tools to provide remote assistance to your clients, for example, lets say that your client has a problem with its machine or with the software itself and he is getting a weird error message that doesn't matter how many times he describes it on an email, or through the phone yo simply can't understand what he means or how the error is happening.

Well, the solution is simple, ask him to go to the About option on his menu, click Help and click on the button request Remote Assistance...

On that moment a request will be send to my servers up in T.O. and I will be able to jump in into his desktop after his authorization to view live and under his supervision what is going on with his system. This is in my opinion the ULTIMATE technical support :).

My kudos to the Real Thin Client for such an outstanding job.

Access to the path "C:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\Temporary ASP.NET Files..." is denied.

Well, this weekend i spent several hours (lots) setting up our new bug tracking software (Axosoft if you wanted to ask) and out of nowhere we start getting the message :

Access to the path "C:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\Temporary ASP.NET Files\bugtrack\5607edd7\fc4d1071\hash.web" is denied.

everytime we try to access their web version of the product. I tried everything i could, and I asked my dear friend google many times. My problem was that lots of people described the problem, but their solutions didnt work for me.

Finally, this mighty article from the msdn saved the day. Interesting to know is that the problem came up as a combination of us installing asp.net, IIS 6.0 and then promoting the computer to be an additional domain controller. That series of events cause ASP to lost control over their temporary directories.

Who figures eh?

How to determine what version of .Net you have installed.

Well, I ran into this situation. After a quick search i found this simple but effective article in the MSDN network.

That only reminds me of the importance to keep a proper versioning system, on days when using years to determine the version of your program (at least for marketing purposes) is the way to go, we cant forget the importance to keep the traditional x.x.x.x version system going and BUILT into each of the files of your system.

HOT NEWS: command line compiler available for download.

Turbo Pro registered users.

Follow this link.

Turbo Delphi en Latino America.

This one goes in spanish!

Amigos!

Para aquellos hispanoparlantes en Latino America que quieran comprar sus versiones de Turbo Delphi o tengan preguntas de como obtener soporte de Borland en sus paises, adjunto los comentarios de dos empleados de Borland al respecto de este tema:

"
Hello,

My name is Lisa Flores (lflores@borland.com) and I work in the
Developer Tools Group for Latin America and wanted to let all of our
Latin America and Caribbean customers know that you can indeed purchase
Turbo locally in many countries and in others, directly from the Latin
America/Caribbean sales department. This page will give you your local
purchasing options:

Brazil: http://www.borland.com/br/company/where_to_buy.html

Spanish-speaking Latin America:
http://www.borland.com/latam/company/where_to_buy.html

Caribbean: http://www.borland.com/latam/company/where_to_buy.html


Saludos,

Lisa Flores
Account Manager - Latin America & Caribbean
Borland Software Corporation
831-431-1434"

A success story of ISAPI, Datasnap and D2006.

A while ago I was hired to extend and complete a very complex ISAPI Delphi web application.

This application was intended to manage high volumes of web requests and responses, with peaks of 55,000 logins per day and around 35,000 transactions per day.

The system is power up by a nice 3-tier architecture using all the DataSnap gadgets available, including a nice implementation of the out-of-thebox load balance and redundancy components included on DataSnap.

Years and several jobs later, a big problem started to show up on moments of high load/volume, a terrible "No more available connections" message start affecting the webservers, the worst part was that the asp wrappers of the ISAPI were fine, so everything pointed to a problem with the dll.

I was contacted to work on this problem, so that is how my adventure started.

Initially the solution was to increased the amount of instances of the DLL that could be loaded in memory. I also tried increasing the IIS back log settings for pending http requests, all this helped but the problem persisted.

The next solution was to increase the number of webservers, this off course helped, brute force did its magic but the volume of requests increased and after some months and the problem showed up again.

After some research, I decided to go the dramatic way, so I ended up upgrading the application to the all mighty Delphi 2006 and its new FastMM memory manager, a new Midas, and the addition of the ISAPI Thread Pool unit.

In order to test if the solution was effective enough without putting at risk the live production system, I setup a nice test environment using the well known opensta testing framework.

The test consisted of 30 virtual users, each user accessing 20 different player accounts, browsing the website, checking their balances and logging out of each account. I ran twice each test against the old and the improved dll.

The results were very good, the response time per request when from an average of a 100ms per request to 25ms per request. (THAT DRAMATIC!)

On the dark side, I got only 6, "500 errors" on the test runs. So on one side I was happy because performance just jumped up, and in the other side I was concerned because I wasn't sure if I was properly addressing the main reason of all this mess.

So I decided to ramp up the test by going up to 100 virtual users and push to the extreme those 60 maximum active modules. The result, simply impressive...

The test ended up doing 12830 http requests to the dll, in the old DLL out of those 12830, 1850 were "500 errors". What "500 error"?, well the famous "not enough available connections". BINGO!

I switched dlls and tried again... GOSH, DELPHI ROX. Out of 12830, only 10 "500 errors". The dll was able to answer most of the requests properly and still in a good time.

Do I have to say more? I can't hide the fact that some nice architectural changes helped a bit, but, FastMM, ISAPI thread pooling and DataSnap, are the perfect combination for web dlls.

Delphi Small Team Pack!

Hey guys,

The DTG is going all the way, in a couple of days www.turboexplorer.com will put their products available for download (including the free Delphi version) and right now you can buy the Delphi Small Team pack, 2 licences with a 20% discount in the Pro, Enterprise, and Architect editions.

Great opportunity for those small high productivity factories out there. :)

Check it out here

Turbo is Back....

Great news!

The Delphi (Development :P) Tools Group is starting its comeback by announcing the return of the Turbo tools. Yeap guys, Turbo Delphi, Turbo C++, all the good ol' friends for all the professional and enthusiast developers out there are BACK with a vengance.

Check this link with the news.

Oracle experiences...

In my current job i have the pleasure to work on an Oracle powered environment.

That has allowed me to get enough knowledge to give a personal evaluation of it, compared to the newest MS database server MSSQL 2005.

In summary, MSSQL 2000 has nothing to do against Oracle 9i or Oracle 10g, in that case MSSQL 2000 looks like Access with Steroids.

But when we put in the mix the latest and greatest MSSQL 2005 things change. Under such situations MSSQL 2005 goes along the way of Oracle 9i, but fails to reach the performance and tweaking capabilities of Oracle 10g.

Oracle has put lots of effort on simplify the Oracle installation and management of the database, but still lacks to the easy of use of MSSQL.

My current home project is being developed on MSSQL 2000, but it already pass some initial testings on MSSQL 2005, so, it is almost guaranteed that by the time its first version is out, it will be running on it.

The next step will be to move my ADO components to dbExpress so i can proceed thanks to DataSnap to support Oracle and MSSQL on deployments.

Why picking MSSQL over Oracle after saying that the last one is better? well, simple, easy of use, i need to have the initial version out soon and there is no time to spend on a database migration.

DeadLocks? well that was the big cons with MSSQL 2000, but i must admit that having all those locking problems did help me improving my SQL skills and my general knowledge of the MSSQL engine. What about Oracle? well, so far, it has behave properly, but we havent hit the system with enough transactions to safely say that is better.

What i do know is that Oracle manages a better locking system, If i'm not mistaken it is applied on a row level , now you can specify that manually on MSSQL (2005 has it by default) but come on wouldn't be nice if you dont have to specify your locking hints everywhere in your SQL statements? (yes you have to if you are doing any serious enterprise system).

Now, I'm going back to my duties and i will keep entering more rants on system performance later.