Olaf’s Thoughts About Development

  After quite a while there will be a face-to-face Delphi Developer conference in the US again.

The conference is organized by S&S Media and supported by Embarcadero/CodeGear.

We have got all the top speakers, including Cary Jensson, Marco Cantu and Ray Konopka.

Many (most?) members of Delphi R&D team (including Barry Kelly - “The Delphi Compiler”) will be at the conference and there will be of course "Meet the Team" sessions.

All Sessions are online and registration is now open. The speakers list includes all those who already submitted their bio and photo. For a complete list of speakers please refer to the list of sessions for now.

If you register before April 10th, 2009, then you can take advantage of the Early Bird rebates.

When : May 13 - 16, 2009
Where: San Jose, CA, USA

More information: www.delphilive.com

S&S Media is a book/magazine publisher and software conference organizer. S&S is well known in the Delphi community for their Delphi focused "EKON" conferences and "Entwickler" magazines.

For comments, questions or concerns you may use the contact form on the DelphiLive web site, or just leave a comment here.

Update: Sessions are online and registration is open now: www.delphilive.com

As an Advisory Board member I am proud to post this official pre-announcement for the next, long awaited physical Delphi conference.

Where: San Jose, CA, USA
When: May 13th – 16th 2009
Who: All Delphi developers, let it be Delphi Win 32, Delphi Prism or Delphi for PHP ones.

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In OOP, we are using Properties to be able to limit access to class members, or to have “calculated” values.  In Delphi Native Pascal, a class with 3 properties may look like this:

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As there is obviously still some uncertainty if Delphi Prism is really a fully fledged .NET development environment, I’m posting an example below to prove that Prism does allow you to LINQ to SQL:

This is a “Customer” class definition with a manual mapping to a “Customers” table on a SQL Server 2005:

type
[Table(Name := 'Customers')]
Customer = class(Object)
private
protected
public
[Column(IsPrimaryKey := true)]
property CustNo:Double;
[Column]
property Name: String;
[Column]
property Country: String;
end;

This is the actual LINQ to SQL code that relies on the class definition above:

method MainForm.button2_Click(sender: System.Object; e: System.EventArgs);
var
LCustomers: Table<Customer>;
LDBMain: DataContext;
LConnectionString:String;
begin
LConnectionString := 'Data Source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Initial Catalog=DBDEMOS;Integrated Security=True';
LDBMain := new DataContext(LConnectionString);
LCustomers := LDBMain.GetTable<Customer>();
var USCustomers := from Customer in LCustomers where Customer.Country = 'US' select Customer;

for each Customer in USCustomers do begin
listBox1.Items.Add(Customer.Name);
end;
end;

Interesting to note is that Prism has a very nice name scope mechanism. Even though “Customer” is a Class name, it is also used as local variable in the LINQ and FOR constructs. I am not saying that this is a good practice though

Technically, both “Customer” variables are different variables - which is quite important to understand.

The full demo source can be downloaded here: Prism LINQ Example (137).

There are a couple of people who have asked if LINQ can be used with the new Delphi .NET version aka Delphi Prism.  The cool thing is that with Prism you can utilize all available .NET technologies. LINQ though, requires some additional compiler support - to allow for the “compilable query statements”.

The good news is, RemObjects implemented all required compiler support! Excellent!

See the simple example below:
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Delphi Prism comes with a nice “Sync Editing” feature. Unfortunately it’s not enabled by default, because it relies on an external “DXCore” assembly, which is available as free download from DevExpress. This “Sync Edit” works for methods only currently, but it does that in a very intuitive way, you don’t have to remember any shortcuts, just write. As little bonus it also gives you “animated bookmarks”. These bookmarks are used for example when you press CTRL-SHIFT-V to declare a local variable or property (which depends on the name you give).

DevExpress is a component set and productivity plugin vendor who serves the VCL and .NET market. DXCore is a base library which is heavily used by their CodeRush and Refactor products.

To finally enable Sync Editing after installing DXCore you need to copy one file manually. Just follow the steps in this  Prism Wiki article.

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) …

There are a lot of new things to learn with Delphi’s new Unicode string type(s). For example look at Lars’ blog. Quite some interesting posts over the last days.

Apparently, the new Delphi 2009 TStringBuilder class has not got much attention yet, so I’ll give a short recap here.

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You may have noticed that Delphi 2009 includes Win32 (Delphi and C++) personalities only. The .NET part has obviously been scheduled for later.

For those of you being curious how the next Delphi for .NET might look like:

CodeGear just “inofficially” announced a Delphi Prism Beta which is basically something like Delphi in Visual Studio. Nick Hodges showed off some early information at SDN in the Netherlands.

Allen Bauer also comments on these, maybe surprising news. So far it looks like in the future there will be two Delphi products, one for Win 32 Development (in the IDE we all know), and an other VisualStudio based IDE for .NET development.

If you have a development realted blog or Web site, then you probably paste source code examples from time to time. Using Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter makes your snippets look very pretty. Read the rest of this entry »