CodeGear drops C# Builder.

I was listening to one of the weekly community podcasts from CodeGear, and one of the topics that was mentioned was the announcement of C# Builder being dropped from the CodeGear Developer Studio 2007, to be released later this year.

Winforms seems to be a no no too. It seems they will be putting all their efforts on Delphi and C++ and Delphi.Net using the VCL.Net. They will convert their existing support for C# Builder to the same level of the VB personality, which means edit, syntax highlight, compile, and basic
debug functionality.

It looks like we will have the possibility to use any existing C# component and add it to your Delphi.Net project with no problem.

For people using ECO with Winforms, they will be ways to move into the direction of VCL.Net, which will be fully supported by ECO on the coming Delphi.Net release.

I certainly agree with their moves, there is no point on supporting a language that they cant controlled. They can use the .Net framework or the Win32/Win64 native APIs, but just like they did with Win32 by building the impressive VCL on top of it, expanding the VCL to support .net will also forced the VCL under native APIs to be extended to new cool functionalities.

Lots of news around CodeGear, which just reasures my thoughts towards the fact that these guys are doing the best they can to have things going the proper way.

Oh final comment, initially it was mentioned that Generics will be only supported from a consumption level, that seems not to be the case, production of Generics will be there too. But, only for .Net initially.

ASP.Net not too scalable....

Scalability is a daily concern on my business. We managed thousands of requests, that startup lots of transactions that will make any online bank website simply jealous.

A couple of times, I worked with companies that use ASP.Net as their web framework of preference and it was not long when we start having scalability problems. It is a well known issue with ASP.Net, but there are solutions.

I found this interesting article that talks about the issue and gives a good solution.

Read it!

Using Visual Studio 05...

Yes, I know, but hey, I was programming on Java a couple of days ago, so for me it is just more stuff to learn and at least it is more visual than Java.

I'm in no way leaving behind my sexy Delphi, we just got a new update and a cool roadmap, but, I need to develop some web applications that connect to my Delphi middletier and the option I have right now is to do some ASPX on C#.

If I'm lucky enough, I should have the new Code Gear Developer Studio with support for .Net 2.0/3.0 by September, so I can use it.

The big reunion.

Hi guys,

I don't know if you were aware of this great reunion between the last two old schoolers of the software industry: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, on an interesting chat together at D5!!.

The vision they had and have is simply outstanding, the advances we enjoy today on the software area can be easily blame to these two great minds.

Enjoy!

http://d5.allthingsd.com/20070530/video-steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-prologue/

What will many cores mean to future window releases?

This is a good article about what is going on with Microsoft around the new trend on Multi Core devlopment.

You got to love AMD Opterons :)

Faster web pages...

This is the link of an outstanding presentation made by the Yahoo’s “Exceptional Performance Team” about optimizing website performance by addressing front end issues. This is part of the web 2.0 expo that happened last April. A MUST read.


Enjoy,


http://www.web2expo.com/presentations/webex2007/souders_steve.ppt

Yes, it is a power point presentation.

A great option for middletier development!

For all those developers that are looking for another option to the mighty DataSnap, now there is a great opportunity to develop reliable and scalable middletier solutions for the same price.

Components4Developers is offering their popular middletier software for free. What is the deal?

Simple, register and download. TurboMiddletier is a full version of their enterprise middletier software KbmMW (a couple of transport protocols and channels are removed but nothing major), it only supports the latest Delphi version, so, if you have Delphi 2007 go and get it now!!

I personally use Data Snap, RemObjects and KbmMW in our projects and can only say good things about them. I do admit that KbmMW is a more mature framework with lots more functionality, but on RemObjects SDK favor, they offer a great DataSnap integration pack that help companies using DataSnap to migrate to their SDK.

Whatever you pick, you will be on good hands, in the meanwhile go and get that!

Using Agile methodologies on your favorite IDE.

My current job is moving towards an Agile development, so, in order to be one step ahead of the game, I am implementing on my home projects most of the methodologies that we will or should be using in our everyday development life.

Browsing around I found this site, which basically is dedicated to implementing Agile methodologies in Delphi. Take a look at it, and subscribe to the forum, it promises to be a great source of knowledge for all those XP/SCRUM/Agile fans.

Ajax and Delphi

I'm finally working on the web applications of my home project, and I decided to work with Intraweb 9 as my web framework which now supports "Ajax" events on most of its components and comes built-in my brand new shinny Delphi 2007.

But, browsing around I found a set of extremely interesting examples and articles about using the Microsoft flavor of Ajax (Atlas 2.0) on ASP.Net with Delphi.

Take your time on rewiewing these examples from Steve Trefethen.


It is worth to mention that TmsSoftware replied to my question about possible updates to their Intraweb web components, the answer YES!, so lets wait a couple of days, for the goodies to come.

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!.