Boise Code Camp 2008

Saturday, March 8th, 2008
At Boise State University in the
College of Business and Economics

Register today to attend free: www.BoiseCodeCamp.org

This free event for technical professionals is produced by the community, for the community.

Code Camp is bigger than ever this year featuring new and exciting technologies, training on fundamentals, a great party, and more.

• 63 sessions from 45 amazing presenters
• The best training value available anywhere
• Fewer slides, more code and examples
• Familiar names and local real-world coders side by side
• An incredible amount of talent and information
• Free lunch, dinner, swag, and giveaways
• Held during non-work hours (we have jobs too)
• Sessions for non-coders as well
• Amazing after party in the BSU stadium Hall of Fame room

No matter whether you are a seasoned coder, a student, a business analysis in software, a project manager, or a hobbyist technologist, there is something at code camp for you. Invest in yourself and come prepared to learn about these things and more:

• ASP.Net
• Agile / Methodology
• Architecture
• Client Development
• Databases and DB development
• Delphi
• Fundamentals
• Games & Graphics
• Google APIs
• I.T. And Operations
• Languages & Frameworks
• Mobile
• Security
• Web Development
• WCF, WF, WPF
• Virtualization
• XML and the Web
• Java, .Net, SQL, Oracle

Register today at www.BoiseCodeCamp.org.

Delphi Survey and the State of Delphi

CodeGear is doing their annual Delphi Product survey. If you haven't taken it yet, I would really encourage you to do it. I know Nick Hodges (Delphi product manager), and he reads all the comments and considers all the feedback very carefully when adding features to future versions of Delphi.

I found it took about 30 minutes to complete, but your mileage may vary. They won't share all the details of the survey, but they will share some of them.

Also, if you haven't seen it, I believe this is the latest Delphi Roadmap.

It still has D2007 as the to be released Highlander, but from everything I have heard, the 2008 Tiburón is still planned to have Generics (aka parameterized types) and Unicode in Win32 (Delphi 2007 delivered Generics for .NET). This is going to be a pretty big change for Delphi Win32. I know we have heard mention of Generics in Delphi for a long time now, but this looks highly likely with it on the official roadmap, and also with the fact it is in .NET and they like to maintain compatibility whenever possible.

While being really cool, the Unicode will also most likely require some code changes in existing applications to support it. Anywhere you assumed a Char to be a length of 1 will need to be updated. Also, storing non-text data in a string may not work right. There are a lot of people are cheering and a lot are grumbling. The survey actually touches on people's concerns with this.

Beyond Tiburón, in the 2009 time frame (code named Commodore) we will see native 64-Bit support, which is also a really big change.

There is also talk about a Delphi Parallel Library (which is actually on the RoadMap for beyond 2009). Allen Bauer has blogged about it quite a bit lately, so I am thinking / hoping it will be here sooner rather then later. The DPL is designed to take better advanced of all the multi-core/multi-processor systems out there. Beyond just thread pools and improvements on threading, I believe we will also see things like allowing a for loop to run each iteration on a different thread, and other language level awareness of multi-threading.

So some really big changes coming in the next couple years for Delphi! We are in exciting times to be working with in Delphi programming!

What to Expect in Delphi Unicode Support

Allen Bauer has a series of great blog posts (with more to come now doubt) outlining some of the technical details of what to expect with the new changes to support Unicode in the upcoming Tiburon version of Delphi.

• An intro to what to expect
• A great one on Unicode Character Categorization.
• Will there be a switch to turn String back to AnsiString? (Hint: No)
• More FAQ's about Unicode

So what is the reaction? Some people are grumpy that some of their code might break. Delphi has a long history of backwards compatibility. I am sure CodeGear will do what they can to make as much code as possible work, but this looks like it might cause some problems if you ever made assumptions about the size of a Char (which was generally discouraged) or used a string to store non-text (Which I am VERY guilty of. They are just so dang useful!) Personally I am really looking forward to Unicode in Delphi, even if there are a few growing pains.

History of BSDG

BSDG actually pre-dates my (Jim McKeeth - DavinciUnltd.com & McKeeth.org) involvement. As far as I know Steve Dahlin started the group as a Clipper users group, but I am not sure when that was. Rich Hundausen took over in 1995 or 1996 and changed it to a Delphi users group (registering the famous Delphi.org domain name!) Steve Garland (of AstaTech) took over from Rich, and after a few years it became the Boise Visual Developers (or BVD like the underware) group to expand its focus now that in addition to Delphi, Visual Studio was a viable development tool . In 2000 I took over and changed the name to Boise Software Developers Group (although debated going back to the Delphi users group), but it is still frequently referred to as the Boise Delphi group. Chris Brandsma (Programmers on Fire and Elegant Code) took over in October of this year - 2007. Hopefully it will continue on for many more years and many more leaders.

Hopefully the others will help me flush this out with some more dates or anything I may have missed. Stay tuned!

Steve Dahlin added:

Actually, the group started as a completely separate Delphi group which I organized. I hosted for the first few months and then others took over after I had suffered complete burnout. The first meeting was held on the 2nd floor of the Central Plaza bldg which is part of the WGI [Washington Group International] complex [where it currently meets].

Richard Hundhausen added:

Wow, very cool. I had forgotten about the lineage myself.

Jim forgot to tell you that during the Clipper user group days, each week we would hassle Steve Dahlin on his choice of screen colors.

(I've heard about Steve's color choices.)

Doug Reece added (and I was negligent in not including him in the history. Sorry Doug!)

I just read your post about the history of BSDG and found it interesting. I also thought that I'd add a bit more info. I was at the meeting where Rich nominated Steve Garland to take over the group. Steve seemed a bit reluctant to take on the job by himself. By this time, Steve and I had become well acquainted and that same evening, he asked me if I'd co-lead the group with him, which I agreed to. I eventually ran many of the meetings myself (Steve's participation became less frequent). I was the one that suggested to Steve that we ask [Jim] to consider taking over leadership of the group, and it was I who actually communicated with you about that.

While Rich was leading the group, we met at (the place he worked, which was some government agency I can't remember). During the time Steven and I ran the group, we met at Executrain at its old location on Executive Drive by HP. It wasn't uncommon to lock people out at that location since the doors were automatically locked after 7:00 pm. I believe that we were still meeting there when [Jim] took over, but then quickly relocated to the place [Jim was] working.

CodeRage II Virtual Developer Conference - November 26-30, 2007 External link: http://conferences.codegear.com/coderage07

Be sure you are registered to attend CodeRage II. This is CodeGear's second virtual developers conference. Being virtual it is a whole lot cheaper and easier to attend. The key is to actually schedule time to watch sessions and be sure you are not working or otherwise distracted. If you are overseas that gets even more interesting.

You can always catch the replays later, but then you miss out on the live chat and Q&A session. I must admit, as a presenter it is odd being in the chat room with the attendees while you are presenting - you are both the presenter and the "peanut gallery" at the same time.

You'll see sessions on Delphi, Ruby, Java, PHP, C++, Databases, .NET, Win32 and all the latest CodeGear tools and technologies.

I'll be attending and presenting both. I hope to see you there, virtually of course!

Orcas is Part of the Delphi Family

So I wanted to look up something on Oracs, the as yet unreleased development tool from Microsoft for Vista. So I went to Firefox and typed Orcas into the Google search box. The first hit that came up was on Wikipedia and it turned out to be on Orca (the singular of Orcas). I actually learned a lot.

I knew Orca where killer whales, and I knew they were related to dolphins. What surprised me was that dolphins and killer whales are both in the Delphinidae family. I thought that was really revealing that Microsoft choose that as the code name for their product, especially now that they are playing catch up with Delphi again. In case you didn't know, CodeGear (FKA Borland) now has two IDE's (Delphi 2007 and C++ Builder 2007) released that support Microsoft's Windows Vista, while Microsoft doesn't have one released yet.

Now someone pointed out that you can use .NET 3.0 with Visual Studio 2005 to get some Vista support, but from my understanding you still don't get Sheet of Glass support on your forms, or some of the other neato Aero effects without writing extra code. And to be fair, CodeGear's 2007 releases don't support .NET 3.0 or much of the specific functionality only exposed through .NET 3.0 - then again, it is a native Win32 development tool, so of course it doesn't support .NET.

The significant fact is that CodeGear has two actual releases for Vista before Microsoft does. There are a number of great innovations in Delphi 2007 that Microsoft is yet to copy.

In related news, CodeGear released their Delphi Roadmap, which shows plans for Highlander to be released this year with support for .NET 2.0 and compatibility with .NET 3.0.

It is nice to see Delphi out in front again.

Score: Development tool releases for Vista

• CodeGear: 2
• Microsoft: 0

Delphi Jobs

So David I posted a link for a Delphi job listing site, and Joe pulled a chicken little jumping to the conclusion that there are only 4 Delphi jobs in existence. Unfortunately there is not one single source that lists all jobs for any skill or category. You need to do a little hunting.

It used to be that DelphiJobs.com aggregated job listings from a number of job sites, and then allowed you to view them all from their site. It was as close as you could get to a definitive listing of Delphi jobs. Since they no longer do that, here is a snap shot of the Delphi job numbers as of right now:

• Dice 192 jobs [feed]
• America's JobBank 404 jobs
• Yahoo! HotJobs 83 jobs
• ComputerWork.com 8 jobs [feed]
• ComputerJobs.com 18 jobs
• DataFrenzy 10 jobs
• Net-Temps.com 23 jobs [feed]
• Moster.com 284 jobs

(Click on the [feed] link to add a feed to your news reader. Maybe Delphi Feeds can include these in a special section!)

Grand total of 1022 jobs! And that doesn't include all the job openings that are not listed on these centralized search listings, or the ones that are filled through networking (the #1 way jobs are filled). Sure, there may be some duplicates between the sites, and some of the jobs postings that are returned in these searches may be mistakes, but it certainly proves that Delphi job market is NOT dead.

It is true that there may not be as many Delphi jobs as other languages, but that is an indicator of two things:

1. It takes less Delphi developers to complete a project then with many other languages. It is a more productive environment and community.
2. Delphi developers have greater job satisfaction and switch jobs less often, thus less vacancies.

So it is a good thing!

C++ Builder 2007 Announced

Just in case anyone missed the announcement. If this comes out before Orcas then CodeGear will have two IDE's released that specifically support developing for Vista and Microsoft will have 0. Looks like things are returning back to the way they were.

Key features and capabilities provided by C++Builder include:

• Seamless support for Microsoft Windows Vista Aero, Vista Desktop and Vista APIs
• Increased ANSI C++ conformance and compatibility including Boost and Dinkumware C++ library support
• New C++ build flexibility and custom configurations powered by the Microsoft MSBuild engine
• Up to 5 times in-IDE build performance improvements over prior versions
• UML C++ source code visualization
• Integrated C++ unit testing
• New DBX 4 RAD data access with support for the latest versions of popular RDBMs including CodeGear InterBase®, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL®, Oracle®, IBM® DB2, and Sybase®
• C++ IDE enhancements including virtual folders and enhanced C++ structure pane
• New INDY 10 Internet Protocol component suite

Read the press release

Delphi 2007 and Binary Compatibility

A really cool feature of Delphi 2007 is it is binary compatible with Delphi 2006 (on the Win32 side). What this means is that unlike every previous Delphi and Turbo Pascal release (as far as I know) you can keep all your compiled DCU files. That means you don't have to wait / hope / pray for your 3rd party component provider to release an updated release for Delphi 2007, most of your Delphi 2006 components for Win32 will work just fine.

Typically what makes a DCU stay compatible is if the interface section of the unit remains unchanged. The really cool thing about Delphi 2007 is they added a new property to TForm for support of Vista Aero, but they still remained backwards compatible.

Allen Bauer broke the news about how this was pulled off. Steve Trefethen has some more behind the scenes details. And as usual, Hallvard Vassbotn has a great technical write-up on all the details.

One really cool think, is I think it was Nick Hodges that said they might actually go to a release cycle that only every other release of Delphi was a breaking release. That would certainly be cool, but their component partners might not like that so much.

Technorati Tags: [Programming] [Software] [Delphi] [CodeGear]

Free Turbo Delphi, C++ or C# External link: http://www.turboexplorer.com/

Just in case you some how missed it, you can get a free Turbo product from Borland / CodeGear. You your choice of Delphi for .NET, Delphi for Win32, C# Builder or C++ Builder, but you can only have one installed at a time. They are based on Delphi 2006. The catch for the free version (called Explorer) is you cannot install components, add-ins, etc. and can only have one version installed at a time. You can buy the Pro version for just a little bit more and lift those restrictions.

[TurboExplorer.com]

Future version will be based on the newer Delphi IDE's. I suspect that after they come out with Delphi Studio 2007 (guessing on the name) with support for .NET, Delphi, C# and C++ then they will have an updated Turbo release. They hinted they may change the restrictions some then too.

Technorati Tags: [Programming] [Software] [Delphi] [Pascal] [CSharp] [Cplusplus] [Free] [Turbo] [CodeGear] [Borland]

Delphi 2007 IDE Multi-Monitor Support External link: http://bdntv.borland.com/pix/nickhodges/Camtasia/Floating/FloatingDesigner.html

Last night Steve asked if you could change the docked and embedded Delphi 2007 IDE to look like Delphi 7 and earlier where everything is undocked and the designer is not embedded in the same window as the code. This is especially nice if you have multiple monitors! I couldn't remember how to do this at the time. Nick Hodges, the Delphi Product Manager at CodeGear, just made a great video showing how to undock and unembed the IDE so it looks more like Delphi 7 and earlier.

The video only takes about 2 minutes and is part of his 2 minute tutorial series.

[Watch]

For the record, you CANNOT have a docked IDE with an unembedded form designer. If you skip the step he includes of switching to undocked, and just uncheck the Embedded Form designer option it switches you to undocked automatically.

Here is what to do, if you don't want to watch the video:

In the Delphi 2007 IDE go to Tools / Options, which brings up the Options dialog. From there go to Environment Options / VCL Designer in the tree on the left. Then in the Options box on the right uncheck the Embedded designer check box. Restart the IDE and you are reliving the good old days!

Lets see you do that in Visual Studio! Multi-monitors is a huge performance improvement, so anything that takes better advantage of that is a great thing.

Technorati Tags: [Programming] [Software] [Multi-Monitor] [Delphi] [Productivity] [Development-tools]

Robocode Java Programming Challenge External link: http://robocode.sourceforge.net/

According to Chris Brandsma, it appears David Starr has thrown down the gauntlet and challenged the rest of us to a Robocode Java Programming Challenge. In Robocode you use Java to program a little 2D robot to maneuver in the virtual arena and do battle with the other robots.

I always thought this was a great type of game. I built a fairly good robot for the 3D D-Robots from PlasmaCode (link no longer available, but I will find it if you are interested). The D in D-Robots is for Delphi, which is actually Delphi Web Script, a 3rd party, open source, Delphi syntax compatible scripting language. Just in case you didn't know, Delphi 2007 for Win32 is out (and ROCKS!) and there is also free Turbo releases of Delphi.

I figure this is a great way to brush up on my Java, and also have some fun doing virtual battle! One major advantage Robocode has over D-Robots (beyond still being available) is that Robocode is open source (as is Java now), so you know it will stick around as long as people are interested. Anyone else interested in a competition?

Technorati Tags: [Programming] [Software] [Challenge] [Robots] [Delphi] [Java] [OpenSource]

Delphi 2007 for Win32 Launch Event

May 11th, 2007 is our Delphi 2007 for Win32 Launch Event. You will want to be present to check out this first look at the first new Delphi release since the CodeGear spin-off and the begin of the Delphi Renaissance. It is a very impressive release! Come hear all the latest Delphi news and get those rumors cleared up.

Also at this meeting we will be showing off and using the new Camtasia to record the presentation. It is our goal to find a way to post this recording for everyone to reference after the meeting.

Then in June we will have a Delphi for PHP Launch Event. I am working on door prizes for both events.

Our usual meeting time is 7 PM at our usual Washington Group International location.