BDS2006 small features, great impact

It is always amazing how small things can have such a great impact on your daily work. The new features in the BDS2006 editor like live templates are obviouos because you can see it immediately while working in the editor. 'Small' improvements and features are discovered along the path.

Lately I noticed a tiny red bug (in dutch we call it a lieveheersbeestje) on a tab in the editor after debugging an application.

It seems that BDS2006 opens units, necessary for debugging, on the fly and implicit closes them when the debug session ends. (This is an editor option) If you stop debugging in such a unit Delphi keeps that unit open. Ain't that great?

I remember debugging a C# project in Visual Studio 2003 where I ended up with an endless list of tabs which is very annoying in my opinion. In VS you have the tabs for design and code besides each other on top of the editor. BDS2006 (and previous versions) have an extra tab at the bottom of the editor for switching between design and code. So in BDS2006 you always have the half amount of tabs in the top tab control compared with VS2003.

So these small features in BDS2006 are great! It gets even better if you popup the context menu on the tab. If you don't want BDS2006 to close the debugged units implicit(an editor option) you can close them by yourself using 'Close all pages opened while debugging' option. Hack you can even close all pages except the one that is active.

Small things, great stuff!

ECO Adventures: Inheritance

Inheritance is one of the five pilars of Object Oriented Programming. In ECO inheritance is, I can tell you now, a piece of cake.
Consider this 'real world' model:

Developer and SalesMan inherit the behavior from Person. Developer and SalesMan are specializations of Person. Implementing this model in a VCL Win32 application using TDataSet would consider a lot of work. For instance the, in fact one-on-one relation must be maintained in the database. A person is either a Developer or a SalesMan, a person can not be both. (if you don't agree you should read this blogpost :-) )
Anyway implementing this becomes, even in Delphi with TDataSet, more complex. In ECO it is a very straight forward process.

Create the windows (ECO) application
Drop three datagrids(dgPerson, dgDeveloper, dgSalesMan) on the form and three ExpressionHandles (ehPerson, ehDeveloper, ehSalesMan) And oh, don't forget to compile first!

Setting the ExpressionHandles
ehPerson:
Name->'ehPerson'
Roothandle->rhRoot (Don't forget to set the Roothandles EcoSpaceType property!)
Expression->Person.AllInstances (Use the OCL Editor here)

ehDeveloper:
Name->'ehDeveloper'
Roothandle->rhRoot
Expression->Developer.AllInstances

ehSalesMan:
Name->'ehSalesMan'
Roothandle->rhRoot
Expression->SalesMan.AllInstances

Setting the datagrids
dgPerson:
DataSource->ehPerson

dgDeveloper:
DataSource->ehDeveloper

dgSalesMan:
DataSource->ehSalesMan

To make things complete drop two buttons for the Developer and SalesMan grid. Connect the roothandle property to ehDeveloper and ehSalesMan and set the for both buttons the property ECOListAction to Add.

Well this is pretty much it! You can see that the grids have all the appropiate attributes for their classes. By running the application we can test it:

Notice that adding a developer or salesman automatic means adding a person. So again the model does all the hard work in the background.
While still scratching the surface of ECO it becomes clear that ECO is very powerfull framework, taking a lot of the work load. Making this little application with TDataSets would be harder (although it can be done). For instance after inserting the Developer you would have to code to get a person in the person table.

Guess what: We did not code at all!

Refactor all the way

After using BDS 2006 for three weeks now I must say it is a real piece of art. I can not think of one reason to go back to Delphi 7. For me the most valuable new features are the improved and extended refactorings. It takes some time to get used, using them, old habbits just don't disappear that easy :-) I guess.

What I always found a bit annoying in Delphi coding was the fact that changing the parameters of an existing method, meant a lot code cruising. OK, you can't have it all but figure this:

In Delphi 7, to change a parameter of a method you should do something similar like this:

1. Change the parameter in the implementation section (iow the method)
2. Surf (Ctrl-Click) to the interface section to change the decleration
3. Ctrl + Arrow Down to go back to the implementation

Delphi 2006, and in specific Together, dramatically improved things. With refactoring you can now change the parameterlist of a method, and Together will take care of changing the declaration (or vica versa)!

The 'Change Parameters' refactor dialog:

With this dialog you can add or alter parameters in a very easy way. Other 'My favourite' refactorings are:

• Extract method (Existed already in D2005)
• Find unit (Helps you finding the unit for the uses clause)
• Declare variable

The new and improved refactorings in BDS 2006 boost productivity, no doubt about that. This and the other editor improvements, like Live templates, made upgrading to BDS2006 worthwhile.

Fooling around with TWebbrowser

For a project I needed to edit a HTML page within a Delphi Win32 application. Delphi has a TWebbrowser component which appeared to be suitable for this situation.
TWebbrowser in fact is a wrapper over Microsoft's Shell Doc Object and Control library (SHDOCVW.DLL) and it brings webbrowser functionality to your application. With a TWebbrowser it is easy to navigate the web and files. There are a lot resources to find on the internet, here I share some of my experiences.

Using TWebbrowser for editing
As said before I needed to edit a HTML webpage. You can get the Document (from the loaded webpage) with MSHTML, a library providing WYSIWYG editing for Internet Explorer and thus TWebbrowser. This HTMLDocument provides access to all the elements of a webpage, and allows you to edit the page visually.
After adding MSHTML to your uses clause you can get the document as follows:

Getting the document:
HTMLDocument2Ifc := (MyWebbrowser.Document as IHTMLDocument2);

Note that the webpage must be completed loaded otherwise the object will be nil.

With a IHTMLDocument2 interface object we can edit the webpage. Now for this project I needed to place links absolute on the page aligned with some body background. But the first thing we need to do is setting the document in edit mode.

Setting the document in edit mode:
HTMLDocument2Ifc.DesignMode := 'On'; //Use 'Off' to switch desingmode off

Setting the body background:
(HTMLDocument2Ifc.body as IHTMLBodyElement).background := AFileName;
HTMLDocument2Ifc.body.style.backgroundRepeat :='no-repeat';

Setting the document for absolute positioning (2-D positioning):
HTMLDocument2Ifc.execCommand('2D-Position', false,true);

Now we can drag the links (wrapped by a span) around on the webpage.

With the execCommand method you can easily do a lot of editing on selected text in the document. To name a few:

HTMLDocument2Ifc.execCommand('Bold', false,0);
HTMLDocument2Ifc.execCommand('Italic', false,0);
HTMLDocument2Ifc.execCommand('FontSize', false, 4); //Set the font size of selected text
HTMLDocument2Ifc.execCommand('InsertImage', true,0); //Use default insert image dialog

There is a lot more, check microsoft MSHTML site for everything.

Another feature of the HTMLDocument2 is that you can get collections of images, links and styles of the webpage. For example you could get all the picture sources as follows:

for i := 0 to HTMLDocument2Ifc.images.length -1 do
begin
Item := HTMLDocument2Ifc.images.item(i, null) as Ihtmlelement;
lbItems.AddItem(Item.getAttribute('src',0) + ' [A Picture]', nil);
end;

Well there is a lot more to explore, but it is easier then you might think at forehand. Here are some links with more resources, to fool around with, on TWebbrowser:

Microsoft MSHTML site
Webbrowser to the max (about.delphi.com)
Brian Cryer TWebbrowser page
MSHTML Editier modus German site with examples.
WebSVN Code examples.

ECO Adventures: Master-Detail

I finally have the time to play with ECO and learn about what it is.
In this episode of 'The ECO adventures' I create a Master-Detail model.

In VCL it is very easy to create a master-detail relationship between two datasets (TDataSets) using the mastersource property. In ADO.NET you can make such relations within the .net dataset, but implementing them is a bit different compared with the TDataSet.
In ECO, it is again relative easy to implement.

Making the model
Take this model, where we have Customers and Projects. This two objects has a relation, where a customer has zero or more projects, and a project belongs, of course, to one customer.
In ECO we can model it like this:



Take an extra look at the /Project attribuut. This is a derived attribuut, in this case showing the projectnumber (an integer) and the description in one field.
This can be done by OCL. The expression for this one is:

self.Number.asString + '-' + self.description

You can easily create this with the OCL expression editor.

I have created this model in a ECO Package, so that it can be used in multiple client applications. (Winform and ASP.NET)

Making the Winform Application
Just add a ECO Winform Application to your projectgroup with the ECO package and make a project reference to the ECO dll. In this case it is the MasterDetail.dll.
After setting the reference, you must select the package in the ECO space of the Winform application, to let the application know that it can use the package.

After that you must first recompile for further designtime support.

Now we can create the GUI. The form has standard a few ECO components, with among others the rhRoot, wich connects the form to the ECO space. (The reference to the model)
Select the ECO space in the ECOSpaceType property of the rhRoot.

Connecting to the object instances of our classes (Customers and Projects) we use ExpressionHandles, which are connected to the model through the roothandle (rhRoot).

To get the project details, we have to use a CurrencyManagerHandle, which has the grid (in general a GUI control) with Customers as the BindingContext. Through this handle we connect to projects of a specific Customer. (This is like the CurrencyManager in ADO.NET)

So let's make this GUI:





Create a new expressionhandler and call this ehCustomers.
Set properties as below:

• Roothandle -> rhRoot
• Expression -> Customer.AllInstances (Use the OCL editor for this by invoking it with the ... button)

Set the property DataSource of the customer grid to ehCustomers. Notice that the grid shows the column name already!
ECO has some strong listactions build in to invoke operations directly on your objects. Set the property ECOListAction of the button right from the grid to 'Add'. And the Roothandle to ehCustomers.

Run the application.

OK this works. So far pretty easy, isn't it? Well now we want to see the projects of a specific customer in the other grid.
Here we need the CurrencyManagerHandle. Drop a CurrencyManagerhandle on the form and set the properties as follows:

• Name -> cmCustomer
• RootHandle -> ehCustomers
• BindingContext -> CustomerDataGrid

The currencymanagerhandle will select a single instance of a customer (iow the selected customer in the grid).

To get the projects we need to drop another Expressionhandle, with the following properties set:

• Name -> ehProjects
• RootHandle -> cmCustomer (yes the CurrencyManagerHandler...)
• Expression -> self.Projects (To select in the OCL editor through the Roles node)

Connect the projectgrid to ehProjects and assign the button for the Add list action.

Run the application.

Well this was pretty much it. Set the property Autoform on the grids to true and you already have a complete working application.

Conclusion:
ECO is a new way of programming (to me it is) .The way to use it is a little different compared to the database-driven approach although the main concept is the same. Keeping the business rules (like the relation) in the model is a strong benefit for the ECO approach. This was 'my first ECO application', and it was not all that hard. One thing to remember is to Compile your application often, this is needed for the designtime support I guess, otherwise you will sometime s look for property values you need which will not be there.

This ECO adventure will be continued...

BDS 2006 in the works...

Well I installed BDS2006 lately and found some time to work with it. Here are my 'first' impressions.

• Installation went smooth, taking about 25 minutes.
• Converting D7 win32 applications went easy, only thing I had to change was the fact that the SQL property of a TADOQuery is now of type TWideStrings instead of TStrings. So I had to change on three location code like this : MyAdoQuery.SQL := AStringList to MyAdoQuery.SQL.Text := AStringList.Text. No problem what so ever.
• Converting an Delphi 8 ASP.NET application was a bit confusing at first, because Delphi didn't see it as a ASP.NET application. Well it was my own fault, I had not all the files in my version control system included, copying it all from another PC worked well. As posted in an early entry I did have a few problems connecting to a SQL Server database with BDP in my ASP.NET application. The problem was that connecting to the database timed out. After struggling around with it for a while I found out that the problem was in the connection string. Where it says hostname I had ' localhost' changing this to '(local) or ' .' solved the problem. I still can not understand what the problem is with localhost. It could be a IIS problem, a SQL Server problem or a Delphi 2006 problem. Anyone...?
• BDS2006 start up speed is fine. Especially starting up one personality is very fast, however don't try to load a project type from another one. :-)
• Coding is fine. Live templates are cool, I had to get used to it though. Together integration is marvelous, ECO is even better!

Well time to pack up my old Delphi 7 and Delphi 8 and move all my projects over to BDS 2006.

I have it :-)

A few days ago BDS 2006 arrived! :-)
Because I'm rebuilding my house at this moment I had to find my PC between the building stuff (and dust) to install it. (My laptop has 256 Mb, I don't think it is a good idea to install it on that, perhaps I will try this later.)

Installation on my PIV 2,4 GHz with 512 Mb went smooth and took about 25 minutes.
Played a little and this beast is really fast and stable.
I got an error running an Delphi 8 ASP.NET application on my connections, somehow the 'old' connection components generated some error in the BdpConnectionStrings.xml file.
I remember such a problem during a Delphi 8 update, but I really don't have the time to investigate it now. Anyone reading this familiair with this problem? Any suggestion is much appreciated. By the way new connections are no problem at all.
(Maybe it is better to uninstall Delphi 8 first....)

The livetemplates are very cool and easy to use.
Well back to building, painting and other stuff, one thing is sure rebuilding your house during a Delphi release is no good idea. :-s

Delphi 2006, editor shortcuts

Adam Markowitz has listed all the 'common used' short cuts in Delphi 2006.

I sure don't know (or use) them all, yet.

View the list here.

Live templates video

While waiting for my Delphi to arrive (back ordered next week :( ) Daniel R Wolf has a really great video on templates. (and more)

In the #3 video he shows how easy it is to make your own templates. These templates are really 'super man' food!

Watch them all here.

BDS2006 video's

While I'm still waiting for BDS2006 to arrive on my doorstep, there is a lot of information about BDS2006 from lucky ones who already got it!

A great introduction video (and more to come according the page) has been made by Daniel R. Wolf from Delphi-Praxis. The first video shows the VCL designer improvements and the live templates in the editor. Even if you don't speak German it is a great video. Super!

A lot information can be gained from all the blogs out there. My primary source is
http://www.delphifeeds.com and of course the Borland blogs.

It seems that BDS2006 really is a blast! :-)

And the waiting continues....... :(

Updated:
Looks like BDS2006 hits The Netherlands now. My supplier changed the tag 'Expected' to 'New!' yesterday 5-12-2006. (Santa Claus day to be specific :-) )

Delphi 2006 launch in Amsterdam

Today was the Delphi 2006 launch in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The event was attended by about 200- 300 developers. (This is a wild guess...I did not count them.)

First David Intersimone gave an introduction to the new Delphi, the history and the future. He showed and discussed the Delphi roadmap.
Cary Jensen gave an overview of the improved IDE, showing the new productivity features. To name a few:

• New refactorings
• Live templates
• Block completion
• And more, much more...
• ....

Especially the possibility to build and share your own templates is very nice.

After that Jason Vokes gave a small introduction of the ALM stuff (Starteam and CaliberRM) and an introduction to the C++ personality. A nice, C++ feature only, is Codeguard, which works in (debug mode) runtime to track bugs which are not spotted by the compiler. Looks like a great feature to me for Delphi. (in the future, that is)

After the break Jeroen Pluimers showed all the Together stuff. Really Live Source. The most of this seems to exist in the Enterprise and Architect SKU. This is very cool stuff, and I'm beginning to hang over to the Enterprise SKU already :-). But this was only the beginning....

Then it was time for Delphi's Golden Egg: ECO III.
Bob Swart (alias Dr Bob) gave an impressive ECO demo. He made an application in 3/4 of a hour without a single line of code. That means without a single line of Delphi or C# code.
He designed an UML Package, added classes with attributes, derived attributes and operations which he then used in a Delphi for .NET winforms application. All necessary coding was done in the Object Constrained Language (OCL) with small expression and statements. He also added a 'state machine' diagram to his model, using guards and..., well forgive me there was so much, but it looked relative easy to implement. He showed what the real power of ECO is: Give you the chance to focus on the business needs of the application. ECO takes care of all the underlying stuff. (like persistence mapping etc.)
Another great feature of ECO is the possibility to reverse engineer an existing database. Well Bob showed it in about, euh... 5 minuts. Sweet!
Jason Vokes had to drag Bob from the stage, because otherwise we still would be there. :-)

So what did we learn?

• Delphi 2006 has lots of new productivity features for Win32, .NET (Delphi/C++/C#)
• Delphi 2006 integrates Starteam and Caliber RM (Enterprise and Architect SKU)
• Delphi 2006 Together integration is mature now
• Delphi 2006 ECO III is the future of Software Development

For a few weeks I have been dubbing between the Pro and Enterprise edition. But now I now I want to use Together and ECO III so I will definitly go for the Enterprise edition.

It was a great afternoon......

Var injection and code completion

One of the great new things of Delphi 2006 is Var injection. It allows you to declare a variable in the middle of your code while the IDE takes care of placing it in the var section of your procedure. (At Nick's delphi blog post you can see how it actually works.)

No doubt, this kind of tricks boost your productivity!

Thinking it over, one of the things that, sometimes annoys me in Delphi coding is the fact that the procedure head in the initialization section of the unit must be the same as the procedure decleration itself. In fact this is no problem, but is has to be maintained during changes in, for example the parameters of the procedure.
For new procedures Code completion takes care of this when you create either the initialize or the procedure itself.

For example typing this in the initialization section of your unit:

procedure MyProcedure;

Clicking Control+SHIFT+C makes the procedure itself:

procedure TMyForm.MyProcedure;
begin

end;

This is great!, however adding an additional parameter in code (after rethinking the procedure) forces you to change the other manually. And that is in big units a lot of code cruising.

Would it be a good idea to use code completion also on existing procedures, so that for example editing the above procedure like this:

procedure MyProcedure(IForgotAParameter : Boolean);
begin
//Do some stuff
end;

....clicking Control+SHIFT+C updates the initialization section and vica versa.

Maybe the together support in Delphi2006 makes this easier?
Don't know, have to wait a little longer.........by the way 29 november 2005, Dutch Delphi 2006 launch in Hoofdorp. For more information click here.

AJAX

Ajax is a new technology (in fact a combination of 'old' technology's) to drive your website. (I always thought it was our famous dutch football team from Amsterdam)
Ajax is hot(or hype). But what is it?

Ajax stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML, it combines XML, HTML, DOM, Javascript and XMLHTTP. Bottom line is that it can solve the problem of many postbacks to your server by allowing you to load only parts of the webpage in the browser via XML.

For a good introduction and (.NET) example you better check out this dotnetbips article.
More on the technology can be found in this article.
Marco Cantu gave a BOF session on Ajax and Delphi at the BorCon, the slides can be found here.

Certainly will give this a try one day.

DevCon papers, code and slides

The papers/code and slides from the DevCon sessions are available for download at :

http://bdn.borland.com/devcon05/delphi

Note that not all papers are submitted for download yet, probably because of the fact that DevCon has not ended yet.

Update:
Watch DevCon (or is it BorCon!?) keynote on BDN here.
Containing:

• Opening video
• Conference opening by David I
• SDO by Rick Jackson
• Tod Nielsen, the new CEO

Great stuff, must attend next year..... :-)

Incremental search.....supprise

Yesterday I was reading on the coding horror blog a rant about searching document files with Ctrl+F.
It said that Visual Studio has incremental search(Ctrl+I), which after I tested it is very usefull. I thought it is (was) a pity that Delphi does not (didn't) have incremental searching.

Today I read a comment on Nick Hodges blog entry Firefox my Delphi that Delphi has incremental searching from at least version 5!
Just click CTRL+E and it works.......

I must have missed something all this years, or this is one of the most secret shortcuts outthere. :-)

A must see ECO III video...

On BDN Henrik Jondell presents a BDNTV episode covering the new features of ECO III in Borland Developer Studio 2006.
In the 21 minutes during video Henrik show very cool (new and existing) ECO III features like:

• Winform Autoforms
• ASP.NET autoforms
• Reverse engineering an existing database
• Actions
• State machines (finally have an idea what those are)
• And much more...

A must see video indeed!

Going for ECO

Delphi's ECO is a great benefit in the .net world compared to Visual Studio. As far as I know there is no such thing in Visual Studio (yet) that matches the brilliance of ECO.

Until now ECO was only available in the Architect SKU of Delphi. According to the feature matrix of Borland Developer Studio 2006 ECO will be in all SKU's available.
The only difference (according the feature matrix) between the Professional and higher SKU's are that the higher SKU's have autoform support for ASP.NET and State Machines.

As a professional SKU user that is great news. Besides the above mentioned differences it seems that the professional SKU only supports basic object-relational mapping and transparent local XML persistence.
That said you can conclude that for ECO with database persistence support a higher SKU is needed.

Anyway I will definitly upgrade my Delphi version to either professional or enterprise SKU!
Still some time to decide....

Another 24 hours...

This sounds like a new movie, but according to Ander's blogpost it is another 24 hours BDNRadio event about BDS 2006 (Delphi, C#, C++ Builder, ECO, VCL etc.) This will happen on the 24 th october 2005.

This will be fun! (again...)

Borland announces Delphi 2006

In a press release Borland has announced Delphi 2006.

Delphi 2006 the Ultimate Force-Multiplier

Wow, that must have something to do with super man!

According the press release Delphi 2006 will be available for pre-ordering between oct. 17 and 1 december.

Delphi, what is it for me?

There is a sort of discussion going on, about what Delphi really is. Nick Hodges blogpost Dignity is deadly, trickered Allen Bauer in his blogpost Passionate Producers = Passionate Customers. One opinion is that Borland drifted away from the barbarian attitude of the early days, and that it needs more guerilla marketing like the 24 hours of Delphi event.
Well Delphi certainly is not only an IDE, it is community a great technology and it is Passion!
Marco Cantu, also added two intresting blogpost, Delphi Passion and Delphi in Trenches (this post really hits the nail on the head, a great post)

Read the blogposts for the full story.

What is Delphi for me, and why do I love it?

For me Delphi is passion, it always helped me to deliver my software projects in good quality and in time.

With the new roadmap it is very clear that Borland is committed to Delphi. Listening to the roadmap BDNRadio show, you can only conclude that all the people involved in the developing of Delphi are passionated and extremely dedicated.
That and the growing list of bugfixes makes me feel very confident that the next versions of Delphi(DeXter, Highlander, Vista,...) will be competing for the title "best Delphi version ever". Go figure it out: VCL Win32, VCL Win64, VCL for .NET, VCL for CF, VCL for Avalon! ECO, .NET1.0, .NET2.0! Man this will be a beast.

Conclusion: Go Delphi!