On with Delphi 2007, BDS2006 Win32 personality retires from the scene

Well I finally converted all my projects from BDS 2006 to Delphi 2007. As promissed by CodeGear there were no fatal issues involved because of the so called 'binary compatability', Besides the usual stuff like installing updated third-party libraries and adding search pathes etcetera everything worked fine.
It is a good thing to make an installation protocol, because installations of the package (sometimes) need to be installed in the proper order. A protocol makes the process even smoother. (It is scary how fast you forget the installation order)

One issue I have had was a problem with the Help after installing my devexpress components. After installing these components there is an issue regarding the Filtering in the Help which then shows only the devexpress help, which is a pitty because the Delphi Help is so much improved. Fortunately Devexpress has an temporary solution which you can find here. (Issue AB12388)

All with all a smooth transition with no fatal ('Oh oh......') moments. ;-)

Now I only use BDS2006 for my .NET related projects. It is a bit strange to have two seperated Delphi's again just as with Delphi 7 and 8, but BDS2007 is on its way so that should be temporary.

Update: I noticed that BDS2006 is not shown in the taskbar. I am not sure that this has to do with the installation of Delphi 2007. Easy to solve anyway, minimize once and it is back.

Back to Delphi 5

Well I am back to Delphi 5. I have had it.......;-) No, no, just kidding :-).
I am very happy with Delphi 2007, but for a new project, I should say, a new, exsisting project, I will have to use Delphi 5. This project has some librarys in Delphi for which the source code is not available so there is no choice for the short term.
Delphi 5 was released around 2000 as I recall, so that was somewhat in the Windows 98 erra. I installed it on a rather old machine with XP (PIV 2,4 GHz, 512Mb)
First thing I noticed was its speed. Wow this runs fast on a clean installed machine. With no libraries installed it runs like Formule 1 car!
And yes component templates already exists in Delphi 5 just as incremental searching.

Well it is fun to step back in time, but I instantly miss the most of recent added features like Tool palette filtering (there are a lot tabs in the old style tool palette), code templates, refactoring etcetera. Will plan for upgrading the project soon :-)

D4PHP database connections with ADOdb

In my quest to setup a DSN less connection to an Access database I found ADOdb on sourceforge which apparently is used by Delphi for PHP.
Here you will find lots of information on getting connected to *any* database.
See this nice overview with all possible database connections.

Update 3-4-2007:
You can setup a DSN less connection to an Access database:

Database.DriverName = "access";
Database.Host = "Driver={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)};Dbq=c:\\phptest\phptest.mdb;"

This should also work, using the jet OLDB provider, but somehow it did not work for me:

Database.DriverName = "ado_access";
Database.Host = "PROVIDER=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;DATA SOURCE=c:\\phptest\phptest.mdb;USER ID=;PASSWORD=;";