Busy, buys, busy...

As busy as a bee! Well, that's my excuse for no blog posts in a while - and I'm sticking to it :-)

I've been having quite a lot of fun with BDS 2006. Update 2 was released last week, and its put a lot more polish on the product.

I've discovered the Borland folks have lavished attention on more than just big ticket items for this latest version of the software. Even humble compiler errors such relating to a mismatch between the declared number of elements and the actual number of elements in a constant array have been improved - Delphi now tells you in the error message itself how many elements are actually in the array allowing you to quickly correct the declaration.

Error Insight got a real spruce-up in update 2 as well. It now gives few false positives. It's just so much more productive to fix those nagging typos and other trivial compilation issues while you're writing the code and before you starting hitting the compile button.

On a slightly tangential, but related, topic: Borland have decided to spin off their IDE business as a separate company to allow Borland to focus more on the emerging ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) market. As a long-time Borland Delphi user (> 10 years now) I have mixed feelings about this move. A strong IDE product is an important part of a soup-to-nuts software development/ALM stack. Borland have worked hard to build the ALM stack they now have (the addition of Segue Software being the latest piece) and risking the IDE part of this stack seems to go against the current mantra of software stacks. If they do make this work and end up with an IDE product that thrives and improves under a tightly focused "DevCo" then I'll be a happy camper.

Cheers,

Raymond.

Delphi 10 (aka Borland Developer Suite 2006) is here! Hurrah!

We now have shiny new CDs representing Borland latest and greatest Delphi offering. There are five of them, which does beg the question: "Why didn't you just use a DVD?". Beggars can't be choosers as they say so I prompty installed it. Prompt I may have been, quick it isn't... The installer scans for a bunch of prerequites like .NET and requires those to be installed before BDS itself will install. Once this is all in order, BDS unfolds onto your system, pulling bits and pieces from the set of CDs as required.

What choice! BDS 2006 comes with a collection of personalities enabling the IDE to target different environments:

1. Delphi for Win32
2. Delphi for .NET
3. C#Builder for .NET (obviously :-)
4. C++ Builder

Pick and mix - you choose. Want Win32/.NET interoperability on the same code base? You guessed it, boxes 1 and 2 are the key. Want to play with Microsofts new language? Yup, #3 is the answer.

After installing BDS 2006 I set to installing our libraries of components. I didn't actually have specific versions of them for this new version of Delphi, but as I insist on having the source for all our components this was no biggie.

I then pointed BDS at our largest application involving some 900,000 lines of source. It all compiled with a sprinkling of new warnings that had escaped the attention of our previous production Delphi environment (Delphi 7). I think that's pretty good really - three major Delphi releases and our code still compiles - don't you?

I love Borland Delphi!

Really, I do! Delphi is simply the bees knees as far as I am concerned. Whether you are writing a tool to manipulate some files, developing complex office software or creating vast enterprise software edifices Delphi provides you with fantastic capabilities to achieve those aims.

But don't take my word for it, oh no, you've got to try it out for yourself :-)

And who am I to be promoting Delphi in this way? Nope, I'm not a Borland employee (disclaimer: But I do own 100 of their shares). Nor am I involved in developing componentry or other tools for sale and use when developing software with Delphi. I'm a software engineer developing desktop office software used by civil engineering and construction companies.

The intention of this blog is to relate a few of my experiences using Delphi and perhaps inspire others to use it.

Cheers,
Raymond.