marcocantu.blog

Delphi 2010 Handbook Part 2 PDF Available

2010-02-05T17:30:14.544Z

Part 2 of my Delphi 2010 handbook is available in PDF format. You can buy it online on FastSpring at the address http://sites.fastspring.com/wintechitalia/product/part2delphi2010handbook. As for part 1, it is about 100 pages and costs 9.80 dollars (about 7 Euros). If you bought part 1, I'll send you out a specific discount for buying part 2. For the table of contents of parts 1 and 2 see the book site at:

http://www.marcocantu.com/dh2010

The third part of book will become available soon, along with the complete book in PDF and in print.

Before you buy the current PDF, consider that it is possible that Embarcadero will buy the licence of the ebook for registered user of Delphi 2010. This is a deal that is being discussed, might happen or not, and don't know the actual timing. Just wanted to let you know, so that if you buy one of the book parts today (less than 10 dollars each, so that's not a big deal), you might receive the same material for free later on.

PS. I know this sounds like killing my own business, but I want to be fair with my readers... and, still, if you want the book now, you have no alternative! In any case, my focus will be convincing you to buy the printed version!

Delphi Developer Days 2010: Cities and Program

2010-02-02T00:05:35.703Z

Today Delphi Developer Days 2010 has officially announced the locations and dates of the five stops US/Europe tour featuring Cary Jensen and myself, along with the sessions program. As it happened last year, this is a two people training event, with sessions in parallel tracks, but also joint sessions, and a small group of attendees (unlike a conference). The five locations will be:

Washington area (US)
Chicago area (US)
Los Angeles area (US)
London (UK)
Frankfurt (Germany)

All dates will be between May 11 and June 1st, 2010. Signup in advance (the sooner the better, as places are limited and locations might get full) and get a significant discount.

We are trying to cover both "foundation" topics and features of recent versions of Delphi, with a strong bias towards Win32 but also some .NET (Delphi Prism) coverage. This is the list of the session titles, more details on the event web site (www.delphideveloperdays.com):

What's New in Delphi and Delphi Prism
Building Robust Delphi Applications
Delphi Prism Development
Delphi and Unicode: What You Need to Know
Designing Interfaces and Classes
Delphi and the Windows API
Internet Delphi Application Technologies Compared
Leveraging ClientDataSets
RTTI, Attributes, and Dynamic Code
Delphi Development for Windows 7
Threads and Thread Synchronization
Delphi Tips, Tricks and Techniques

We'll also have daily Q&A sessions and guest speakers (different in the various locations), presence of Embarcadero representatives and in some cases Delphi evening events. More details will be announced. Feel free to have a look to the site, comment here... and (did I mention it?) signup!

Republishing Old Delphi Books

2010-01-28T20:27:52.818Z

I'm trying to redo the type setting for some "classic" Delphi books of mine, of which I have the original text and images (and the full copyright), like the "Delphi Developers Handbook" (published in the Delphi 3 time frame) and "Mastering Delphi 5" (or an earlier edition or a "summary" edition). The idea is to make them available primarily in PDF format, but possibly also in print. These books have a lot of content, most of which still applies to today's product, although some areas are far from complete... after 6 or 7 versions of the product. The reason this took so much time is I was trying to take the existing material and update it and improve it and rewrite it and add new examples and on and on. Considering those two books account for over 2,000 pages, that's unlikely to happen any time soon. Every time I started over the last 3 years, I never got past 50 pages...

So I've devised an alternative plan (republish the original, rather than do a new edition), with two sub-options:

a. Have the same exact content, possibly redoing the typesetting and removing the few chapters that are outdated.

b. Have the same content as above, adding a number of footnotes simply indicating changes and differences in newer versions. Very short notes, pointing out to new books or web pages where to find more info, not a detailed descriptions of the new features (which will bring me back to a new edition).

Of course plan b requires more time and effort (so it might delay the books significantly), but also adds more value to the republished books. Still, it is much, much easier than a new edition. A further option is to start with plan a and evolve it into b, giving a sort of subscription (buy a and get also b) or a huge discount for people interested in starting soon but getting also the final work. Only the latter will get to print.

While I'm busy finishing Delphi 2010 Handbook, I'm interested in figure out the next step in terms of publishing... and interested in your feedback. What would you prefer as a reader and buyer?

123456 for Password

2010-01-26T16:58:33.962Z

I think this is not a terribly technical post but I couldn't resist posting about this mythical password ("123456") and its variations, after an informal research shows it is heavily in use.

The first time this great password was made popular was during the following dialog in the Space Balls film, at the point the "bad guys" are stealing the fresh air of planet Druidia and have been given the secret password:

Dark Helmet: All right, give to me.

Roland: The combination is (hesitates) one.

Dark Helmet: One.

Colonel Sandurz: One. (writes)

Roland: Two.

Dark Helmet: Two.

Colonel Sandurz: Two. (writes)

Roland: Three.

Dark Helmet: Three.

Colonel Sandurz: Three (writes)

Roland: Four.

Dark Helmet: Four.

Colonel Sandurz: Four. (writes)

Roland: (hesitates) Five.

Dark Helmet: Five.

Colonel Sandurz: Five. (writes)

Dark Helmet: So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. (lifts mask) That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life. That's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage.

...

President Skroob: Great. Now we can take every last breath of fresh air from Planet Druidia. What's the combination?

Colonel Sandurz: 1-2-3-4-5

President Skroob: 1-2-3-4-5?

Colonel Sandurz: Yes!

President Skroob: That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage.

President Skroob: Prepare Spaceball 1 for immediate departure!

Dark Helmet: Yes, sir!

President Skroob: And change the combination on my luggage!

That combination is not used just in luggage, if it is true as reported by an analysis (reported in the following PDF by Imperva) of the password used at the site rockyou.com (not a high secutiry site in user's mind, for sure) the top passwords are 123456, followed by 12345, the numbers to 9, to 7 and to 8 (in the order). Some 13,000+ smart users went for 654321! Great move, compared to the 500,000+ of the previous combinations.

I'm also intrigued by a few more groups of tens of thousands of users who picked "Password" as password or "rockyou" (the site name). There were also 13,000+ lazy typist who used "qwerty" the sequence of letters on their keyboards, right below 123456.

I know you've probably seens worse password stories among your users, if anyone is willing to share they are welcome!

Microsoft, Native Code, and Security

2010-01-21T11:21:35.006Z

One of the core tenets of the entire .NET architecture (compared to the native Win32 world) was security. At the very beginning, it was often claimed you could mathematically prove that a managed application was types safe, you could use Code Access Security to determine if an application had specific permission to execute any code deemed potentially unsafe. Also the goal (4 or 5 years ago) was to rapidly phase out COM (declared an obsolete legacy technology right after .NET was launched) and native code in favor of an all managed ecosystem.

Fast forward to the last few weeks. First, one of the most heralded new features of Silverlight 4 is its COM binding capability. This goes against the security mantra (even if this will be possible only for applications installed locally), the entire idea of portability (how could a Mono app on Linux talk via COM to Office is a mystery), and the notion that COM is obsolete. One of the core issues is Microsoft Office interaction. If Microsoft cannot push Office as an element of its development ecosystem.

Second, one of the cornerstones of .NET security, Code Access Security, is "retired" as Tim Anderson clearly tells in his blog. Even if powerful, the model was too complex for most programmers to comply with and system administrators to enable. This certainly doesn't compromise the security of .NET applications in any way, as I doubt it was really used.

Now if we put these two unrelated announcements together, the morale is quite obvious (at least to me and many other die-heats native Win32 developers): Native COM and Win32 code is here to stay and using it properly doesn't compromise security. This is not surprising, given the amount of new native (COM and Win32) features in Windows Vista and (even more) Windows 7. There is nothing new in recent operating systems you cannot use in a native application.

Connecting the dots, however, I'm tempted to push this a little forward. Contrary to what Microsoft envisioned or hoped or simply told us, the Windows ecosystem is not moving towards a .NET centric solution, but .NET is only a powerful and sophisticated execution and development environment on top of Windows . Which is what Delphi and the VCL are, even if at a much smaller extened due to the highly different R&D budget behind it. I know this is debatable, happy to hear about your point of view.

Delphi's EProgrammerNotFound on StackOverflow

2010-01-19T23:53:22.407Z

The mythical EProgrammerNotFound exception (covered well over one year ago in this blog) was featured today on the StackOverflow support site (which has a rich and growing Delphi users base).

You can read the request and the various responses at the URL http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2084120/eprogrammernotfound-exception-in-delphi. Among the various replies (some of which mention my Fun Side of Delphi sessions and my Delphi 2009 Handbook) there is a rather detailed reply by Allen Bauer, who unveils the background story:

It is just the result of a long day and we had gotten a little giddy. We'd always joked about replacing some error message in the compiler for one of the most common errors with a similar message. It was a simple conversation; "Oh, you should have raised the EProgrammerNotFound exception in that function."

"LOL! We should add that exception and see who notices." "I wonder how much speculation there will be about why it is there?"

There was quite some speculation, in fact. Well done, I have to say, and keep jokes coming.

Embarcadero European Partners Meeting in Rome

2010-01-15T01:13:40.199Z

During this week, I spent two days in Rome at Embarcadero Technologies' European Partners Meeting (or more precisely, their 2010 Sales Kickoff). I was there as a local partner reselling (mostly) Delphi. The meeting was hosted by Nigel Brown, head of International Business at Embarcadero (and former Borland director at the European level). There were many European executives (like Ludo Neveu and Jason Vokes), most other European employees of the company, plus a few US guest including Head of Product Management Micheal Swindel and the company CEO and founder Wayne Williams. There were other many other partners, both technical and sales oriented, some of whom I had met and other who knew about me or I had been in touch with over email.

As a large part of the content was either internal data or future projects, there isn't too much I can say about the actual content of the meeting, as you might guess. However, particularly after having had some conversations with Wayne and Micheal there are a few impressions worth sharing:

Delphi is in good hands, the company cares for the product (and in Europe it has a considerable chuck of sales), is actively investing on it, is listening to customers. Yes, the resources are limited and things do take time and effort, but the attitude is positive.
Maybe because I'm out of a sales-oriented meeting, but you don't only need a good product but ways to put in in more hands. Newer licensing options, different SKUs (with a cheap version), attention to schools and universities were discussed... and they can affect (positively or negatively) a product like Delphi. I have good expectations.
I met most Borland/Inprise/CodeGear CEOs, but this is the first time you can actually discuss the technology with a CEO. He's not an active programmer any more, but if you talk (as actually ahppened) about local BDE engine versus SQL Servers and navigational (ISAM) databases he knows what you are talking about and why having more options matters to the developers community.
I could start a careeer in sales (won a 100 Euro prize for a presentation, but Pawel got the grand prize), but would probably not. This was part of a new effort not only to improve the sames process, but to improve the overall way the company communicates.
I asked to clarify what will exactly happen after the current upgrade offer to 2010 expires, and people with older versions won't be able to upgrade any more. Something should come out.

Finally, Elisa (the Italian link) and others set up a very nice tour of Rome (2,500 years of history and art and gossip in 2 hours), with a final dinner. Rome is alwasy a very nice place to visit, even for a few hours. It is now closer to where I live due to a new railways tunnel between Bologna and Florence.

PS. Sorry for not blogging much, but I have started the year with a peak of work (consulting, events, development, and books) and will keep blogging quite slow for now.

My Delphi REST Paper in French and German

2010-01-07T17:50:28.640Z

My white paper on REST in Delphi 2010 has been translated to French and German languages (as I found out almost by chance). The two sites are:

I'll let you know if I spot any other translation. Notice the videos are in English only.

Delphi Prism 2010 White Paper (by Brian Long)

2010-01-07T11:49:36.773Z

Since a couple of weeks the European Embarcadero site hosts a white paper by Brian Long on Delphi Prism 2010. As for my paper and the one of Bob Swart on REST and DataSnap (respectively) you have to leave your contact information to download the white paper and there is a large series of videos (in this case 6) covering the white paper content. As a Delphi and .NET expert, Brian does a very good job explaining Delphi Prism in details.

As there isn't a single page listing them all, here is the list of white papers on Delphi 2010 (the three on the European site and the one by Cary Jensen):

Bob Swart, mini site: http://www.embarcadero-info.com/in_action/radstudio/db.html
Marco Cantu, mini site: http://www.embarcadero-info.com/in_action/radstudio/rest.html
Brian Long, mini site: http://www.embarcadero-info.com/in_action/radstudio/prism.html
Cary Jensen, PDF: http://www.embarcadero.com/images/dm/technical-papers/delphi-unicode-migration.pdf

Delphi 2009 white papers (including a few I wrote), instead, are listing on the Developer Network site at http://edn.embarcadero.com/whitepapers.

Windows 7 All Tasks (by Neil Rubenking)

2010-01-05T00:21:00.244Z

I noticed a link on a Twitter post to a very interesting short article by Neil Rubenking (a long time friend of Delphi), showing how to obtain a complete list of all Windows 7 tasks, also referenced like "Windows 7 God Mode", in a folder. So I tried it out right way, and was really impressed. I cannot show you the complete list of 301 tasks, which is extremely long, but give you a feeling the image below (click to enlarge).

Notice you can change the layout to some extent (small icons, details, and the like) but with some of them I managed to crash Explorer. And, like others, I'm wondering how many other secret GUIDs you can use in folder names in Windows.