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.

If creating IW controls dynamically, then always be sure to explicitly set their Name. They won’t always get a default name – and empty names may lead to strange behaviors.

If you create IWRadioButtons dynamically, then also be careful that you always set their “Name” and “Value” properties to the same value – unless you know what you are doing. Value is important for correct control and group recognition during postbacks. Sounds odd but has to do with the way how the underlying INPUT HTML controls are working.

Unfortunately, at least in IntraWeb 9.0, IWRadioButtons synchronize Name and Value at design-time only (no idea why – I cannot remember having touched that during my time at Atozed). The attached IWComRadioButton source file fixes that, so that you only have to care about “Name”.

Note: That file is for IntraWeb 9.0. It may work with older or newer versions, but I did not test that. This is not an official file version, but just a personal contribution to the freely available visual control source files of IntraWeb. Use modified sources at your own risk – the guys at Atozed can support their own versions only.

According to Mike Nash, Microsoft’s Windows Product Manager, there will be a release called “Windows 7” anytime soon (or less sooner).

So I guess that’s somehow a service release for Windows 3.11, as Windows 3.11 was followed by Windows 95 (RIP) a couple of years ago.

If I’m wrong though and Windows 7 is supposed to be the successor of Windows Vista, then I wonder what the product management and marketing department of MS is smoking these days, with Windows 2003, 2008 on the market already …

Anyway, good that CodeGear was wise enough to not remove the Win 3.1 components. They are still there, even in Delphi 2009

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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As I recently noticed and already mentioned by Jim McKeeth Delphi made it back into the Top Ten of TIOBE’s Programming Community Index. Actually “we” are Ninth!

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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.

My two favorite Delphi plugins are now available for Delphi 2009:

• GExperts
  An Open Source project that adds a ton of useful wizards and other functionality to the Delphi IDE. For me CTRL+G, which pops up the “Procedure List” dialog, is one of the most, if not the most important features.
  
  The MessageDialog wizard or “Components to code” are also very helpful.

  Update 2: Erik Berry, the GExperts Project Leader, just announced the availability of a first official GExperts beta supporting D2009. See the announcement at www.gexperts.org. The setup  can be found in the download section.

  The official website does not have the D2009 version yet. “Toms”, a German Delphi community member compiled it for D2009 and offers it at the Delphi Praxis Forum (German only, but you should be able to locate the download). There is currently still a problem with the expert’s Registry location – you would have to manually move it from /Borland to /CodeGear …
  Update 1: Toms just uploaded a fixed version and he also added an English section. Thanks Toms!

• DDevExtensions
  A free Delphi IDE plugin made by Andreas Hausladen.
  
  Important update: Please use at least version 1.9.1. Version 1.9.0 had a bug, which caused “’’ is an invalid interger” exception under certain conditions. Version 1.9.1 is available here.

  DDevExtensions adds stuff like “indention via TAB” – as it should work out of the box And the “Unit Selector”. Only know a part of the unit name you want to use? Hit ALT-F11 with DDevExtensions installed and get a list of all units the compiler can ‘”see” – of course with incremental search:
  

Once you get used to these tools, you feel lost when you have to use Delphi without them

Apparently many developers of Web sites and especially Web applications (IntraWeb, ASP.NET, PHP etc) are still not aware of existing tools to trace/debug the communication flow between Web browsers and Web server.

Often, certain errors such as missing images, non working JS files etc, pop up (i.e. customer calls and says “your Web app is totally broken”), and its very hard to determine whats happening. You could now add logging capabilities to your Web application and try to find out whats happening. That’s not a bad idea, but often it would help more to see what’s really sent over the wire, which resources fail to load etc.

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Disclaimer: Even though Delphi 2009 has just been announced, this is still a beta blog, as we didn’t get the “golden build” yet.

There are a couple of beta bloggers who already mentioned that the installation process’ speed has been dramatically improved with Delphi 2009. I just wanted to confirm that, so that you guys, desperately waiting for the new Delphi version, can really be sure they did their homework Read the rest of this entry »