Olaf’s Thoughts About Development

Die Auswertung der Teilnehmer-Feedbacks für unsere letzen beiden DelphiExperts-Veranstaltungen in Berlin und Stuttgart liegt vor. Wir freuen uns über die ausgesprochen positive Resonanz und bedanken uns bei allen Teilnehmern für ihr Interesse!

Die Ergebnisse finden sich hier: www.delphiexperts.net/events

I hit "Yes" on the dialog below, which basically says:

"Are you sure you want to delete the Internet?".

Please don’t bash me if you cannot get to the Internet anymore – I am working on restoring a backup

English: This article provides some preview information about Delpi/Prism/Pascal on the Mac compiling for the iPhone. English content is available at Daniels Blog.

Native iPhone Anwendungsentwicklung bedeutet normalerweise das Auseinandersetzen mit Objective C, der Haus- und Hof-Sprache von Apple. Man bekommt, nachdem man sich als Entwickler bei Apple registriert hat, die komplette X-Code IDE inklusiver aller Werkzeuge praktisch kostenlos zur Verfügung gestellt.

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As mentioned in my previous blog entry S&S Media came up with a new publishing concept called “Intellibook”. Intellibook is basically an Adobe Air application which makes all digital content of S&S (books, magazines, articles) available for online reading.

Today they have added an EKON 13 channel to www.Intellibook.de,  which allows all EKON 13/Delphi Live! attendees to download slides and other materials of that conference. Another great idea of IntelliBook!

If you attended EKON 13 and have not received credentials for Intellibook, then please go to IntelliBook’s account management page and fill in your Name and email. Please add to the comment field, that you attended EKON 13 and/or mention this blog post.

Vom 23. bis 27. November 2009 präsentiert die Entwickler Akademie zusammen mit dem Entwickler Magazin das nächste Delphi Code Camp in München. Sechs der bekanntesten deutschsprachigen Delphi-Experten Olaf Monien, Bernd Ua, Daniel Magin, Holger Flick, Thomas Pfister und Daniel Wischnewski werden in zehn eintägigen Power Workshops, tiefgehendes Know-how anhand von vielen Praxisbeispielen vermitteln. Codebeispiele können von Teilnehmern hands-on am eigenen Laptop mitentwickelt werden.

Seien Sie gespannt auf 5 Tage vollgepackt mit wertvollem Wissen und  Informationen über neueste technologische Entwicklungen in der Delphi-Welt – beste Networking-Möglichkeiten inklusive!

Natürlich sind auch wir von den Delphi-Experts mit einigen Workshops in der bekannt hohen Qualität vertreten. Inhaltliche Fragen zu den Veranstaltungen von mir, Daniel und Holger können gerne hier gestellt werden.

Hier alle Workshops im Überblick:

• Delphi 2010 – Was ist neu? Ein Intensiv-Workshop, Montag, 23.11.2009 – Olaf Monien und Daniel Magin
• Windows Vista & Windows 7, Montag, 23.11.2009 – Daniel Wischnewski
• Entwicklung von Webanwendungen mit der VCL für das Web/ IntraWeb, Dienstag, 24.11.2009 – Olaf Monien
• dbx4/Datasnap 2010 /BlackfishSQL, Dienstag, 24.11.2009 – Thomas Pfister
• Einführung in die professionelle Softwareentwicklung unter .NET mit Delphi Prism, Mittwoch, 25.11.2009 – Olaf Monien/ Holger Flick
• Reporting mit Delphi/Win32 und Delphi/Prism, Mittwoch, 25.11.2009 – Thomas Pfister
• Test Driven Development, Donnerstag, 26.11.2009 – Bernd Ua
• Delphi & COM Programmierung, Donnerstag, 26.11.2009 – Daniel Wischnewski
• Multithreading Delphi 2010 (nur Win32), Freitag, 27.11.2009 – Bernd Ua
• ASP.NET mit Delphi Prism, Freitag, 27.11.2009 – Daniel Magin

Alle Infos auf:  http://entwickler-akademie.de/codecamps/delphi-cc

At EKON 13, last week in Darnstadt, Germany, Software & Support Verlag gave away Netbook computers for free to attendees who booked “all-inclusive” package. This Netbook is not just a simple Netbook like you see in many stores these days, but there is an interesting concept behind:

Intellibook

The hardware is not that important, it’s the software: at www.intellibook.de you can download an Intellibook application. This Adobe Air based application serves as an online access point to all publications S&S ever released (and made digitally available yet).

This Intellibook offer is not free of course, but there are a couple of different subscription models, that allow you to get access to articles that interest you – or just everything. It basically depends on your budget. Intellibook subscriptions come as add-on to your existing paper-based subscription, or can be purchased separately.

At www.intellibook.de they will soon add a store where you will be able to order subscriptions, currently they offer the Intellibook version of their .NET Magazine subscription for an additional 1,40€ / month. More subscription models are to be announced soon. Below is what I have in my subscription box currently:

Intellibook has of course a full text search button, so you can search the whole library of digital content of S&S. The full text search engine still needs some improvements, as it obviously does not find all words I tried. Very nice is that the content is delivered as PDF (which will be displayed right away in that Adoby Air application). Standard PDF has the advantage that you can save it and read offline – on any device that handles PDF.

Depending on the subscription you purchase, you will even receive an Intellibook Netbook computer for free. In that case it comes with Ubuntu and that Intellibook software pre-installed. As the software is Adobe Air based, you can also install Windows on the Netbook (you have to buy a Windows license though). If you want the Netbook separately, then you can purchase it for 199€ (+VAT)

My personal experience with Unbuntu on the Netbook wasn’t that good though. It installed absolutely seamlessly (they gave me “naked” Netbook for review), which was kind of impressive. For me as Windows user, Ubuntu (even though it looks nice) unveiled all these “Linux symptoms” I really do not like. Error messages that only experts do understand, printers that are complicated to install, Firefox shows weird behaviors etc

So I decided to install Windows 7 – remember Adoby Air is cross-platform – Win 7 installed easily as well, at least on the first look. The problem was, that the wireless driver did not work. I downloaded the very latest version from RealTek’s website, but no go. Win7 said it’s working, but it did not see any of my networks. The wired lan driver was not detected by Win7, but it worked after manually installing the driver. Without wireless access a Netbook isn’t really fun.

So I decided to try Win XP (no, I won’t try Vista): It installed without error message, but it needed the driver CD that came in the box. After all of that was installed XP came up – and even had the wireless drivers working. So for now my favorite is Intellibook/XP

At EKON 13, last week in Darmstadt, Germany, my partner Daniel Magin held a session about how to debug with Delphi. One of the things he demonstrated, was the usage of Memory Managers for debugging purposes.

Since Delphi 2006 there is a new Memory Manager in Delphi: FastMM4 – which is an Open Source project. That one has many advantages over the old BorlandMM. Especially for server-type applications (such as VCL for the Web / IntraWeb applications) FastMM4 is a must – many problems in IntraWeb applications have their source in the old MemoryManager, which is simlpy not designed to handle large numbers of objects being created and freed. I.e. you should download FastMM4 it if you are still on D2005 or older.

One thing that FastMM4 can help with is detecting Memory Leaks. This has been discussed on many blogs already (look for ReportMemoryLeaksOnShutdown := true;), this is really helpful and can even be configured.

Detecting Memleaks during Debugging is one important thing, but locating code that overwrites memory, or accesses objects that have already been freed is also very important. Consider the following code:

program Project20;

{$APPTYPE CONSOLE}

uses
  //Decomment to find memory errors
  //SafeMMInstall,
  SysUtils,
  Classes;

var
  sl: TSTringList;
  i: Integer;
  j: Integer;
begin
  ReportMemoryLeaksOnShutdown := true;
  try
    sl := TStringList.create;
    i := sl.Count;
    //Free Stringlist by purpose
    sl.Free;
    //...

    //Somewhen later - by accident - access a reference to a freed Stringlist
    j := sl.Count;

    //just do something ...
    if j = i then
      Writeln('j=i')
    else
      Writeln('j<>i');
  except
    on e: Exception do
      WriteLn(e.Message);
  end;
  ReadLn;
end.

It accesses a stringlist’s count property after it has already been freed. In complex Class hierarchies this is a situation that may easily happen.

Memleak detection is turned on, but with D2009 this code will run through just fine. There are possibilities to download  FastMM’s full version and tweak it’s config file to detect this situation.

An other option is to use an other Memory Manager, as Daniel pointed out: SafeMM, which is an Open Source project, hosted at Embarcadero’s CodeCentral. Just put “SafeMMInstall” as very first item into your projects uses clause and it will raise exceptions, every time you do something which would corrupt memory. Now recompile your project and let it run – you “error-free” application might unveil quite some errors now

Use SafeMM only for debugging purposes – it’s memory footprint is about 4x the normal one.

English abstract: This posting is about a “Which Delphi version do you use?” poll. We are currently focussing on the German market, but if you like you may vote as non-German too of course.

Es gibt/gab sicherlich schon viele Umfragen zu diesem oder einem vergleichbaren Thema, aber dennoch haben wir von DelphiExperts mal einen Poll zum Thema “Welche Delphi Version setzen Sie hauptsächlich ein” aufgesetzt.

Die Ergebnisse verändern sich sicherlich im Laufe der Zeit, daher ist es eigentlich besonders interessant diese Frage permanent zu beobachten. Insbesondere da wir von den DelphiExperts ja speziell auch Training und Beratung zu Delphi anbieten und daher natürlich beobachten müssen, was denn die Delphi-Benutzer-Basis überhaupt derzeit einsetzt.

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Yesterday I revisited a nasty problem that occurs on Windows 64bit versions. I ran into that when I upgraded to Windows 7, but it seems it affects older 64bit editions of Windows as well.

After installing D2009 on a clean Win7 machine I was happy to see that Windows 7 really is what Vista should have been. It works snappy and has a lot of productivity features. But then when I started compiling and debugging a couple of my existing Delphi applications I experienced Debugger crashes almost everytime when I terminated an application.

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Möchten Sie Webanwendungen (oder auch Websites) mit ASP.NET erstellen? Sie möchten dies mit Delphi tun?

Kommen Sie auf die RoadShow der DelphiExperts!

Wir zeigen Ihnen zunächst was Delphi Prism ist und wie man damit unter .NET arbeitet, danach erlernen Sie das Erstellen von ASP.NET Anwendungen. Wir werden als ganz konkretes Beispiel einen WebShop ausgehend von einem leeren Projekt aufbauen. Die komplette Themenübersicht finden Sie in den Anmeldedetails.

Wann: Montag, 27.07.2009, 09.00 – 17:00 Uhr
Wo: Düsseldorf, Intercity Hotel, Graf-Adolf-Straße 81-87

Die DelphiExperts das sind Daniel Magin, Olaf Monien und Holger Flick. Unter dem neuen Label erhalten Sie ab sofort High-End Know how rund um Delphi.