marcocantu.blog

Delphi 2007 and 2009 eHandbooks

2009-11-23T17:20:11.579Z

My two most recent books on Delphi, Delphi 2007 Handbook and Delphi 2009 Handbook are now available in PDF format, for anyone who doesn't qualify to get them from Embarcadero Technologies for free. In fact some registered users of Delphi 2007 and registered users of Delphi 2009, plus developer who downloaded the RAS Studio 2009 trial for a given period of time, got these ebooks for free. However, developers still on older versions of Delphi or anyone who recently migrated from Delphi 5/6/7 to Delphi 2010 doesn't qualify. Since the book cover new features of each version, if you are moving to Delphi 2010 from classic versions of the product, you'll find a lot of information in them.

Granted these books can certainly been found online at some illegal download site, but I feel it is relevant to provide anyone the option to buy a legal version of the PDF, in case they don't want to pay the extra costs for printing and shipping the paper version of these books. Prices are about 50% of the printed version if you include shipping and handling. The "Delphi 2007 eHandbook" is available at 25 USD, while the "Delphi 2009 eHandbook" is priced at 30 USD. If you buy one and add the second to the cart, you'll get 3 USD off.

There is an introductory offer that gives you a 5 USD off on each book using the MARCOEBOOKS coupon. This discount coupon expires on December 1st, 2009: feel free to pass it around to any of your friends! If you buy both ebooks with this coupon you end up paying 42 USD, that is less than 30 Euros. That's for two ebooks totally over 600 pages. Of course, both books are still and will remain available in printed format at Amazon.com and Lulu.com. The only think I cannot offer, at elast for now, is a cross promotion of the printed and electronic version.

For this ebook offer I opened an online shop managed by fastspring.com. They offer a very powerful and flexible online shop, manage all sales (including tax-related issues), seem very responsive, provide the download mechanism, have a very configurable system (well, possibly even too much, as you easily get lost in the options) and ask for a more limited fee than most other sites. So I've decided to give this site a go, while finishing an ebook offer for the Delphi 2010 ebook, which should be ready quite soon. Let me have any feedback related to your online experience with fastspring.com, both when buying my ebooks and with other products you shopped for on their site.

As an addition, I'm thinking of offering Amazon Kindle support, now that you can also buy ebooks using the free Kindle for PC, but Amazon's 50% commission on sales is somewhat discouraging me.

Interbase Roadmap: IB in the Cloud

2009-11-19T23:46:16.029Z

Just saw a reference to an article with the updated Interbase roadmap on http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/40179. While 64-bit support is certainly a significant update, what got my attention was Cloud Deployment support for Interbase 2011, as you can see below (I hope Embarcadero doesn't mind me deep linking the image):

Overall, I think more and more small databases, specifically those powering web applications, are going to live on the cloud, but I'd live to be able to have full synchronization between some views in my big internal DB and the cloud database exposed to the outside.

Choice Guard Popular... on This Blog.

2009-11-19T17:15:19.732Z

While looking into Google Analytics for my blog site, I noticed a huge number of visits to a page on Microsoft Choice Guard. Quite odd for a Delphi developers oriented blog, so I decided to delve into it.

First, the page in question is titled "Microsoft Choice Guard" and covers the technology Microsoft uses to prevent other browsers from possibly becoming the default browser. Even recent Internet Explorer updates prompted me to install this "feature". This page is from April, but in the last month it received 15% of visits of the site, way above any other page (and made me richer by a whopping 2 dollars through AdSense). Looking into Analytics it show this is clearly the top hit from Google searches, which are:

1. microsoft choice guard

2. choice guard

3. delphi windows 7

4. choice guard microsoft

There are a few other related searches, but these account for a large fraction of the entire hits coming from Google. This made me curious, so I did went to Google, entered the term, and found out that the page is ranked 1 in the related Google search:

The apparent reason is that Microsoft is very silent about this feature, and the first direct link to them is the 9th (and is on their answers site). Nice to get the traffic, even if it makes very little good to my business. And very interesting to know how things happen on the web and in search engines. Should improve my ranking, though.

Links: War for Web, Image Swirl, Delphi 2010 Review

2009-11-18T16:32:01.441Z

Too little time and too many interesting links, so I'm summing that up in a single post, even if the three topics are totally unrelated.

Tim O'Reilly on "The War of the Web"

Tim O'Reilly blogged about "The War of the Web". I guess this is something that might become a milestone, as web giants like Facebook and Microsoft (and Google, even if to a lesser extent -- at or least more subtle one) are trying to turn the web into their web. A must read article for anyone looking into web technologies and social networks, and a relatively short one. As a use of social web sites, I hate those that try to "confine" you... and let see how this post looks on Facebook (where it appears both through the RSS feed and the Twitter title posting).

Delphi 2010 Review

There has been a very nice review of Delphi 2010 that is worth mentioning. It is on TechRepublic at http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=1924. Not taht is is terribly technical, but it is quite positive... and it is nice to see the company push for reviews rather than hide them (as it happened).

Delphi Image Swirl

Google Lab's Image Swirl is impressive, in both the capability to notice similarities among totally diverse images and the graphical presentation. This is one of the "pages" or "swirls" you can see when searching "Delphi", which is all things Delphi, including the Greek city, automotive tool, and all. But there are Delphi boxes and images, including a couple of yours truly.

PS. Very nice that while you "swirl" the URL changes so you can use it to refer to a specific "configuration". Seems a new way of combining AJAX with URL persistence.

ITDevCon 2009 Report

2009-11-13T11:33:44.505Z

This is a short overview of the two days I've spend at ITDevCon (agenda here) in Verona, for a very nice Delphi conference organize by the Embarcadero distributor in Italy, Bittime. The conference was packed with information, high quality talks on Delphi for Win32 and Delphi for PHP. I attended only a few selected talks... because I ended up giving 6 sessions myself. For other (and more detailed reports) you can see the blog posts (1 and 2) by Pawel Glowacki.

The conference was not large (about 50 attendees), but given it is a new event and the current economic climate, this was actually better than I thought. The organization was very good, with all of the friendly people of Bittime helping attendees and speakers. My only criticism is that sessions were short with little time in between, and this cause a permanent shift in the schedule, which at times was hard to figure out. Italian attitude, in good part... maybe I'm not too used to conferences in my own country!

What was very nice was the presence of a heterogeneous set of topics and group of speakers, with several PHP gurus (like Jose Leon Serna, author of Delphi for PHP, and Francesco Fullone who heads the largest PHP user group in Italy), quite a few Delphi experts, and talks on Agile methodologies and the like. Kudos to Daniele Teti for a very balanced conference.

Day 1

On the first day there was a schedule talk by David Intersimone, who could not make it to italy but was very kind to set up a Skype video call in the middle of the night (his time). His introduction to All Access was done by Pawel and Fabrizio Bitti, along with an introduction to the conference and the status of Embarcadero. After the keynote I gave a "vendor" session on Advantage Database Server (a database I use, give training on, and resell in Italy). Next I gave a session on two new features of the Delphi language, generics and closures (or anonymous methods).

In the afternoon I had no session, but needed some time to prepare for the next day, catch up with email, and chat with several attendees and fellow speakers. I attended asession on Subversion by Daniel Magin, one by Daniele on messaging systems and one on PLC development (Delphi is very big in Italy in the industrial automation section). After the sessions there was a brief speaker panel (with almost no questions...), a nice wine tasting opportunity, and than we all went to downtown Verona to see the Arena, Juliette (or Romeo and Juliette fame) balcony, find some food, and relax.

Day 2

On the second day I had to give too many sessions, but still enjoyed the conference. I covered Multitier development with the new DataSnap in Delphi 2009 and 2010, and gave my "classic" session on multithreading (with Pizza references). In the afternoon I attended a session on Enterprise Data Access patterns (good job, Daniele) and gave my last two on Domain Specific Languages in Delphi and on jQuery. This was a session I gave for the first time. I started introducing jQuery, showed it in action live in the Firebug console, and finished with a few demos of a jQuery application talking with a Delphi 2010 REST server. I'll try to work more on JQuery in terms of writing material and presenting it, as it is a very nice technology I've enjoyed using for a few years.

Other sessions I missed were very nice (and I could not get to any by Pawel and Boian Mitov), but as always at a conference with several parallel sessions you have to choose (and some were also conflicting with my own sessions). This has been a very nice event, and hope it will be the starting point for a new Delphi Italian conference to be help every year.

Conferences, Conferences

This was the last public speaking event for this fall (which ended up quite crowded in terms of conferences), but I'm at work with Cary Jensen and his wife Loy to set up our Delphi Developer Days next spring, in the US and Europe. That will probably be the first event in 2010. There is also the option for me to set up a 2-days Delphi 2010 class in English language in December here in Piacenza, Italy. If anyone is interested, let me know ASAP.

Getting Rid of Description Pane in Delphi 2010

2009-11-10T19:16:32.402Z

There is a "feature" of Delphi 2010 that I don't stand, the new Description Pane of the Object Inspector. Don't take me wrong, I'm impressed by the improvements of the product and haven't even opened Delphi 2009 in a few months now. There are many improvements and I really recommend moving to Delphi 2010. But there are also a few things I don't like (but I do have a fix, though).

This is a small area at the bottom of the Object Inspector offering a description of the selected property (like it happens in Visual Studio, I guess). However, there is no description ever displayed, only an empty area with the property name repeated, like you can see at the bottom of the Object Inspector for the Caption property of TButton:

You might start looking for a way to get rid of it. There is no option. Nothing to right click. Nothing in the detailed Options page of the Object Inspector. What about making is smaller by dragging the slider at the top? YOucan end up with only half a line. Better, but quite ugly:

The solution? There might be a hidden registry setting or something, I ended up writing some code in a design time package to locate the Object Inspector (which is the form called 'TPropertyInspector'), select its 'DescriptionPane' component, and forcing its height to 0. The effect is the pane is now totally gone:

Out of the dozens of great new features in Delphi 2010 (many of which I mentioned in this blog and other have covered in details) this one is rather annoying. It is another half-done help mechanism, much like Help Insight. We badly need improved help in Delphi, not only by having complete help files (I still keep my fingers crossed for those), but providing better integration with the IDE. This Description pane and the Help Insight are tools going in the right direction. Too bad that comments in the new areas of DataSnap and dbExpress don't follow Help Insight own conventions as they started doing in Delphi 2007. At times I think this side of Delphi is somewhat helpless... but still hope to be proved wrong.

In any case, getting back to the main topic of this blog post, if you use Delphi 2010 and want to get rid of the Description pane you can add to a design time package the unit available as NoInspectorDescriptionPane.pas.

Call for Unicode Migration Stories (by Cary Jensen)

2009-11-05T19:07:49.118Z

As he blogged on http://caryjensen.blogspot.com/2009/10/share-your-unicode-migration-story.html, my friend Cary Jensen is looking for experiences in migrating Delphi projects to Unicode. He is looking for "real-life stories from developers".

The deadline for submitting ideas and material is November 27, but the sooner the better. You can email your contribution to Tim Del Chiaro at Tim.DelChiaro@embarcadero.com or submit them using the Get Published interface at the Embarcadero Developer Network (EDN). More details are in Cary's blog post.

This would be a very nice way to help the community at large in learning from experience how to migrate applications to Delphi 2009 and 2010. The material will be edited and organized, so don't worry about writing perfect English or giving out many details, even a rough skeleton with code samples will probably do.

I migrated most of the programs quite smoothly, with some extra hassle in my web servers code. The piece of code I probably had to change more often was file reading and writing code, based on streams, like:

stream.Read (strData[1], length (strData));

Good that I could move to the new (in Delphi 2009) TTextReader and TTextWriter classes, which are also much nicer to use. Anyway, I'll look for more migration issues and send them to Cary. Hope you'll contribute as well, as this can really become a community-driven effort.

PS. Meanwhile, my REST white paper (focused on Delphi 2010) is almost done and will become available in the coming days. Stay tuned as usual.

Delphi Application Showcase

2009-11-03T10:54:11.255Z

Embarcadero has set up an official Delphi Application Showcase, at http://www.embarcadero.com/application-showcase. The idea is quite interesting and even if there were already similar lists around, having an official one by Embarcadero (and having the company use the Delphi community for marketing the product) is quite nice.

The user interface is nice, even if not very intuitive (how do you move to the next element? is there a way to get the complete list? I think no), and it is even nicer it was implemented with Javascript (using the scriptaculous library) while at first sight it might as well seem a Flash page. When will we have a Javascript IDE from Embarcadero? But I'm digressing...

Make sure you send them information about your applications written in Delphi (and other Embarcadero languages), at http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/39930.

Ironically, I just proposed a similar project to the European marketing, and it was not accepted as this was already in the works. There is one significant difference worth considering. The current list of programs in the Delphi Showcase is mostly made of utilities, shareware, Internet client applications, and the like. In my view, it would be very relevant to have business applications (including applications that are not for sale, but made for internal usage). I hope people who wrote software in this caterogy will submit and Embarcadero will accept them, as this is an equally large category of programs written in Delphi.

Kudos to the idea and let's hope it grows, as for now the list of Good Quality Applications written in Delphi at Delphi Wiki is much longer. The more the better in terms of visibility, even if some of the programs are not well known to the large public.

La guia de Delphi (Spanish edition of Delphi 2009 Handbook)

2009-10-31T01:08:57.883Z

Spanish Embarcadero partner Danysoft has released the Spanish edition of my book on Delphi 2009, titled "La guia de Delphi". This is the third published translation after those in Japanese and Portuguese.

More information about the book is available (in Spanish) at http://www.danysoft.com/bol/guiaDelphi.htm and you can buy the book at http://www.codegear-shop.com/epages/62042259.sf. From what I've been told, an ebook edition will also be made available.

Delphi 2010 Help Update 1

2009-10-30T00:09:30.300Z

Embarcadero has released the first update of Delphi 2010 Help. If you have the product, make sure you download it, as the improvements (even if not massive) are significant, particularly in the coverage of new units. As an example, I was not sure if the Diagnostics unit I found in the source code (featuring a very precise stop watch) was just slipped there or was an intentional as it was not mentioned. Now it is in the help, along with the new Timespan unit.

There is also new documentation for the GestureMgr unit, and some of the DataSnap components. For more information and download instructions see:

http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/40075