Seems to be a theme here. . . .
It appears I am saying my good-bye to two of my old friends. I knew this was coming on both accounts, but the reality is finally here. First of all, I good-bye to Borland, hello to Embarcadero. The people and products will still be there, but it is a new company. I expect this to be a change for the best. Now I need to figure out a way to re-brand all this Borland merchandise I own. . . .
My second old friend I bid farewell to is bsdg.org. I registered the doman name when I took over as president of the Boise Software Developers Group back in 2000. In that time it also became my first blog site, which I found quite enjoyable. At my high point I broke the news about PDC 2005 thanks to an email from the organizer, and that resulted in links from Robert Scoble as well as many others.
As of October 2007 I moved away from Boise, and Chris Brandsma took over as president of BSDG. At one point I debated changing to to the Borland Software Developers Group and keeping the domain name, but Delphi was already dropping the Borland roots at that point. All my old blog posts are still there someplace, but they are hidden behind a wall of cryptic 404 errors provided by the ASP.NET CMS that was recently installed. Rather sad. Maybe I will migrate some of the content here. . . . .
Nick just posted an updated Delphi Road Map. Check it out. This looks to be one of the most significant Delphi releases in a long time. This road map is just covers native code, not .NET - that will be in a future road map I guess. Anonymous Methods, Generics and Unicode stand to be huge langauge and framework improvements.
I must say, Delphi Live Templates and the Scripting Engines are REALLY amazing. I wanted to make a new scripting engine, but then I got to thinking that my scripting engines had a lot of similar code, so I figured I would make a Live Template to create Scripting Engines. I based it on Nick’s BaseScriptingEngine from his article on Creating a Live Templates Scripting Engine.
I then created a Template Project for the Scripting Engine Package. So I can pop out a scripting engine now faster then you can say “Delphi Rocks”.
I thought I would share my Scripting Engine Unit Template. You will probably want to make your own Scripting Engine Package Template Project, but if there is enough interest I will share mine out. You will most likely want to modify this template to suite your own framework.
[Scripting Engine Unit Template]
Note: This references my general scripting engine to create a new GUID. You will need to do that manually until I dress up my general scripting engine for public consumption.
Ever wonder what class to write next in Delphi? Well, combine Delphi Live Templates (including a custom scripting engine) with www.ClassNamer.com and you never have to wonder again.
Although how to implement that class is another question.
If there is any interest in the code let me know and I will polish it up and post it. I created a random HTTP parser script engine and then the live template does the rest. I figured this would be a fun way to get familiar with Live Templates and the custom scripting engine. This is a really powerful feature of Delphi.
Joel once again has an interesting article about Marian Headphones. To sum up, IE8 defaults to standards compliant which breaks most of the existing web sites that worked around earlier version’s of IE’s poor standards compliance. Idealists believe that is great! Pragmatists believe that breaking most of the web is a bad idea.
Here is Joel’s prediction:
The IE8 team going to tell everyone that IE8 will use web standards by default, and run a nice long beta during which they beg people to test their pages with IE8 and get them to work. And when they get closer to shipping, and only 32% of the web pages in the world render properly, they’ll say, “look guys, we’re really sorry, we really wanted IE8 standards mode to be the default, but we can’t ship a browser that doesn’t work,” and they’ll revert to the pragmatic decision. Or maybe they won’t, because the pragmatists at Microsoft have been out of power for a long time. In which case, IE is going to lose a lot of market share, which would please the idealists to no end, and probably won’t decrease Dean Hachamovitch’s big year-end bonus by one cent.
What camp are you in? Pragmatist or Idealist?
I don’t think it is completely cut and dry. I am a practical idealist personally - when possible we should do what we can to move toward the ideal standards, but continue to make existing stuff work as much as possible. Maybe with a warning that something is non-standards compliant. I am a big fan of flagging things deprecated when developing libraries. Leave the old methods in place, but let the users know that they will be going away. If possible provide tools and tips to aid in migration.
The point Joel makes that a lot of pages can’t be updated for various reasons is a valid one. Same is true of deprecating and eventually removing methods in a development library. Developers may skip a few updates, or might not have access to all the source code to make the changes required. This is especially a big deal for run time libraries that existing compiled code depends on.
Delphi has typically been really good about marking things as Deprecated and giving users plenty of warning that things might change. Indy on the other hand is pretty bad about breaking things between releases, and not providing a very clear path to making your code work with the new version. Microsoft is usually really good at supporting their users (Office) but not so hot with their developers and leaving code written in earlier IDE’s unable to compile in the new version.
I agree that is good for IE to continue to become more standards compliant, and they are in a mess of their own making, but I do believe that Joel’s point is that a lot of the standards were incomplete or didn’t cover things that were needed. Like the now deprecated <blink> tag was not in the standard, and it was only the fact that Netscape supported it as a result of user demand that caused it to be added. Netscape, Mozilla and Opera still support it, although Internet Explorer has dropped support for it.
I don’t think it is in IE’s best interest to release a browser that appears to all those browser detection scripts as IE and causes the page to render funky for IE when it is no longer necessary. This results in messed up pages. Maybe they need to change the IE user agent based on what mode IE is running in so that if it is running in standards mode then pages don’t assume it is non-standard. . . . Opera does that, which is pretty effective.
If you want to program with Microsoft’s Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) then you will need the TLB or header files. These can be generated from the IDL files that come with the Windows XP SP2 Platform SDK, or any of the subsequent platform SDKs, the latest being Windows SDK for Windows Server 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. You will need MIDL to generate the needed files. It is rather a pain to download that whole SDK and then generate the useful files.To make your life easier I have generated the useful files, and also ran them through Delphi RAD Studio 2007 for Win32 to create Object Pascal wrappers for your Delphi programming pleasure. Then I wrapped it all up in a zip for easy downloading. Much quicker to download.
As a note, you do not need to deploy any of these files, or the files in the SDK with your application. You just need to ensure that the Background Transfer Service is running on the target machine.
For more information, I have created a hub page on Advanced Downloads with Delphi that I will update with more information as I gather it.
Enjoy!
[Download C, TBL, H, PAS archive]
Technorati Tags: BITS, Downloads, Service, SDK, Library, Delphi programming
My thanks to Andreano Lanusse, the Product Line Manager for Latin America at CodeGear, who just posted a list of 3rd Party Components for Delphi 2007. This is a great resource. Andreano is open to suggestions and feedback on his list too and has provided his email address for everyone.
This has long been one of the strengths of Delphi - the strong collection of 3rd party components. 3rd party component development was of course fostered by the fact that Delphi came with full source for the VCL and RTL. A move the Microsoft if finally duplicating in releasing the source for the .NET framework. Although unlike Delphi, Microsoft will not allow you to modify and recompile the framework in your applications. With Delphi you can tweak the VCL and recompile it (not a trivial task, but allowable and possible) for your applications. Granted doing so makes moving to new versions of Delphi a little more tricky, and you cannot redistribute the modified source.
BTW, notice the link to my TurboPower page on line 27.
This is cool. I figured out a way to assign the same class helper to multiple classes in Delphi 2007. Marco Cantu asked me if I knew how to do this during CodeRage II, and then David I. mentioned that Class Helpers should be used to implement Aspect Orientated Programming (AOP), but since they don’t support assigning the same class helpers to multiple classes that wouldn’t work.
I’ll write this up later. It isn’t a best case scenario, and requires a few extra lines of code, but it accomplishes what I set out to do, and that is pretty dang cool! Hopefully later CodeGear will extend class helpers and make this and other cool stuff easier. . .
Check out Alister Christie’s latest movie on CodeGearGuru.com. He covers the elusive Exceptions in Constructors and Destructors. Thanks Alister. That was one of the questions from my Exceptional Exceptions session that I needed to follow up on.
