Olaf’s Thoughts About Development

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is an announcement for a CodeGear Webinar about using .NET with Delphi Win32. This seminar will be held in German language.

Am 14.10.2009 um 10:00 (MESZ) werde ich in Zusammenarbeit mit Embarcadero/CodeGear Deutschland ein (kostenloses) Online-Seminar abhalten in dem das Verwenden von .NET Funktionen aus Delphi Win32 vorgestellt werden wird.

Die Veranstaltung wird über das Embarcadero LiveMeeting-System durchgeführt. Hier geht es zur Anmeldung.
(Die Freischaltung erfolgt 15 vor Beginn)

Um vor der Veranstaltung den LiveMeeting Client zu installieren und/oder zu testen klicken Sie bitte hier.

Inhalt:

Wer native Windows 32 (und später ggfs. Win64) Anwendungen mit Delphi  erstellt, kann sich in der Regel auf schnellen, stabilen Code und kurze,  effektive Entwicklungszyklen einstellen. Es gibt eine reichhaltige, in  Delphi integrierte und durch zahlreiche Dritthersteller verstärkte  Komponentenbibliothek mit der sich die unterschiedlichsten Probleme  lösen lassen.

Es gibt jedoch manchmal Situation, wo man als "nativer"  Delphi-Entwickler auf das .NET Framework schielt, weil dort eine noch  viel größere Klassenbibliothek - in großen Teilen sogar kostenlos - zur  Verfügung steht und ein anstehendes Problem dort bereits eine Lösung  hat. Deswegen das ganze Projekt nach .NET zu portieren (sei es nun  Dlephi.NET oder VisualStudio/C#/VB.NET) ist jedoch meist nicht  vertretbar - was also tun?

Interessanterweise gibt es Schnittstellen zwischen .NET und Win32  Anwendungen, die es erlauben, aus Win32 Anwendungen auf .NET Funktionen  zuzugreifen.

Die Standard-Schnittstelle ist hier COM/Interop, allerdings dürfte das  viele Entwickler eher abschrecken. Mit "Managed-VCL" und "Hydra"  existieren zwei 3rd Party Produkte, die gewohnt Delphi-komfortable  Schnittstellen zur Verfügung stellen. Diese Lösungen sind leistungsfähig  aber kostenpflichtig.

Als wenig bekannte Schnittstelle bietet sich zusätzlich "Reverse  P/Invoke" an, was für für C#/C++ Entwickler recht mühselig ist (und  daher vermutlich kaum verbreitet). Für Delphi User ist das jedoch extrem  simpel einsetzbar, da das notwendige "Brimborium" komplett vom  Delphi-Compiler versteckt wird.

Diese Session wird die drei genannten Alternative vorstellen und mit  praktischen Beispielen zeigen, wie man z.B. Winforms oder  .NET-Verschlüsselungsroutinen aus Delphi für Win32 nutzt.

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

Holger recently mentioned Live Writer again, which is a Windows application that simplifies writing your blog posts with WordPress and other “standard” Weblog systems. Extremely cool - I must say

Inserting images/screenshots is really a snap now!

The so called “Delphi-Tage 2008″ which is a community driven conference in Germany, will be held on June 13th - 14th 2008 in Günzburg. Read the rest of this entry »

This is another demo that shows some features of the upcoming new Delphi version - codename “Highlander”. This time I show basically two things: 1: Working with Xaml, i.e. how to use WPF/.NET 3.0; 2: Mixed Pascal and C# project groups Read the rest of this entry »

Many people are still wondering why to use .NET at all, because they can do all their business fine with Delphi for Win32. This article demos a Reference Analyzer, written in Highlander and meant to be a real world tool. The purpose is to list all .NET assemblies, that an other assembly (dll or executable) depends on. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I got the permission from Nick to blog about Highlander - the new upcoming Delphi version! Read the rest of this entry »