Delphi around the clock

From David I´s blog:

The 24 hours of Delphi BDN Internet Radio event July 13, 2005

War of the OOPs?

Nick Hodges talks in this post about some quirks, regarding to OOP and the .NET Framework. Of course his statement "Microsoft doesn't quite get OOP" does generate a lot of dust and discussions out there.
Julian Bucknall replies in his own CodeFez entry stating "Nick doesn't quite get OOP", and Steve Teixeira's responses in his blog here.

I must say I agree a lot with the statements that Nick makes regarding the .net framework, although I can not oversee all the technical details (yet), I think:

- The .NET framework is far by mature, it takes a lot of code to make things happen.
- ADO.NET is not mature yet (I can not say that it is not designed properly, but it still misses some important pieces in my opinion). See my blogentry When has the data changed .
- OOP code is supposed to reduce the amount of code.
- Sealed classes should not exist.

I must say that I probably only feel this way as a Delphi VCL developer since 1995.Anyway very intresting reads though, all that different opinions out there.

Riding the fast lane...

VCL Win32 still the fastest lane to develop ;-)


Click to enlarge

A look in the kitchen called Delphi

Steve Trefethen has an intresting post about The Delphi R&D development Process. Really intresting to read how Delphi is made (...in Borland).

Hello DeXter

See the new Delphi IDE -> Delphi 2006 codename DeXter.

The video shows a C++ application build in DeXter.

DeXter:

• Nice tabs
• Nice little blue balls at the edge of controls
• Looks fast

Some old Delphi papers

I moved some of my papers, formely hosted by The Software Developer Pages, to this weblog. The papers cover the Delphi basics on OOP programming and Database programming. They are now about five years old and based on Delphi 5, but I guess they are still pretty actual.

If you are intrested, here are the links:
Papers in English
Papers in het nederlands

Delphi and SDO

Borland is pushing hard the Software Delivery Optimization technology. It has until now always been difficult to exact point out what it is and how it fits in the Delphi IDE and our daily work as a software developer.

On BDNTv you can watch a serie of episodes, which explains SDO and show previews of how different part are integrated in de Delphi IDE.

To point out a few:

• The Borcon 2004 keynote by Boz Elloy 'Maximizing the business value of software', a (long) talk about SDO.
• Using Starteam in Delphi 2005 A short video about using Starteam and the history view in Delphi.
• The New Delphi 2005 Caliber RM plugin A short video, introducing Caliber RM, a tool for gathering and tracing project requirements.

It is pretty sure that Delphi will fully integrate the SDO stuff in the future. I personally don't use it right now, but the integration will surely help 'playing' with it and later on using it.

The future of Delphi

On Bitwise Magazine, you can watch a video interview with David I. David talks about Delphi and about the future of Delphi. So if you wanna know where Delphi (Borland) is heading go over and watch it.

Some history

A post in the Borland non-technical newsgroup about the history of Delphi triggered me to dive in the history of computer languages.
You can find a complete overview of the history of computer languages here. There are 50 languages in this timeline chart.
It all starts in 1954 with Fortran. I am not sure if this is the first computer language ever because only 50 out of 2500! are shown.
Pascal 'starts' in 1970 and evolves to Turbo Pascal in 1983 and later on of course into Delphi(1995).
The charts shows relations between the languages. One particular is the one between Delphi and C# in the year 2000, so I guess C# really is Delphi's brother. :-)
The site has great resources to all kind of languages.

For the complete history 'From Pascal to Delphi' (including codenames and release dates) the guys at Dragonsoft made an overview here.
On Delphi Basics you will find a brief history on Delphi.

My history with Pascal/Delphi:
For myself the history with Pascal starts in 1989 with Turbo Pascal 3. (Can't remember the exact version)
A couple of years later I made a slight turn to Clipper, but I did not like the 'not existing' IDE, I guess Turbo Pascal already had an excellent integrated enviroment (Editor and Compiler in one IDE).
Clipper, of course, was great with databases, but I turned to Turbo Pascal 6 in combination with the TOPAZ toolbox, which was incredible with DBASE databases. (I can remember a book coverage with plumbers, plumbing the data into your application :) )
After that I used all Delphi versions except version 3.

For those who don't know yet you can download several old TP versions from the Borland Museum.

New online magazine: Bitwise Magazine

The BitWise Magazine has gone live, covering Delphi, Chrome and other languages, and also other computer related stuff.
It comes once a month and is worth checking out!