Olaf’s Thoughts About Development

Apparently, CodeGear, a department of Embarcadero, has chosen Black Friday as release date for the all new .NET edition of Delphi:

Delphi Prism

Delphi  Prism is basically a plugin for Visual Studio, which delivers the Pascal Language plus some exciting extra features to Microsoft’s .NET development platform.

Get a trial version from CodeGear’s Code Central. Delphi Prism is part of RAD Studio 2009,  the ISO (1.4 GB!) offered for download on that page contains Prism only though.

Prism has to be activated by a license key. You can request a 14 day trial license on the same page and/or use a purchased RAD Studio 2009 license key. In other words the ISO contains the full product.

The Prism product page does not yet have a “purchase” link, but the marketing department is currently working on getting an announcement e-mail blown out. I guess that the purchase link will be activated while that happens. As the ISO contains the full product, you can switch from trial to full after the 14 days, just by entering a new license key.

Technical Information

Prism is not an upgrade of what you may know as Delphi.NET from RAD Studio 2007 or earlier. Prism is a complete new tool. It has been developed by a partner of CodeGear’s, RemObjects and comes as the solution for .NET and Mono in RAD Studio 2009. It completely “integrates” with the .NET framework. It does not bring any “Delphi Win32” dependencies. This means all executables/assemblies you will create with Prism will be “pure” .NET (or Mono) ones. No more P/invoke weirdness.

Porting Delphi Applications

The good news are: Prism Pascal is very compatible to Delphi Native Pascal. There are a couple of differences, which are well documented.

The bad news are: There is no VCL on Delphi Prism. In other words you can port business code more or less easily, but you have to re-implement your GUI code. After all I don’t think that’s  too bad though. You have all .NET possibilities instead. System.Windows.Forms, WPF, Silverlight …

If you want to dig into the technical details, then have a look at the Delphi Prism Wiki. As Delphi user you might want to start with Delphi Prism syntax compared with Delphi Win32 syntax.

More information to come (including German Prism Workshop in Darmstadt) …

With CodeRage III, CodeGear’s Virtual Developer Conference (December 1-5, 2008), approaching, all speakers have to find a solution to pre-record their sessions. One way is to load a trial version of Camtasia Studio, but if you did that a while ago already, then you either have to purchase or find an alternative if you cannot afford a license.

I gave Wink, the open source solution for tutorial and presentation creation, another try a week ago. It basically works, and if taking into account that Wink is for free, it has an amazing feature set.

I must say though, that if you know Camtasia, Wink does not reach its usability. You might say now that comparing free and commercial Software would be unfair, but there is at least one free option for Camtasia:

The latest issue (24/2008) of Germany’s c’t Magazine comes with a free version of Camtasia Studio 3.0.2. Thats an old version (current is 5.0 6.0), but its completely working. They had a similar offer a year ago or so for version 3.1 (thats the one I’m using) – but that expired now as I found today.

So, if you are a CodeRage speaker, don’t have a session recording solution yet and if you are in Germany or know someone in Germany, try to get a copy of that magazine.

Martin Beck and Erik Tews are presenting the (probably) first practical attack against WPA:

http://dl.aircrack-ng.org/breakingwepandwpa.pdf

The described attack is a bit limited, but it’s interesting (and maybe scary) anyway.

WPA is the “safe” successor of WEP, which are encryption methods for wireless LANs. WEP is known to be easily hackable since quite a while.