I noticed on YouTube a short video by Embarcadero describing the Trial offer including my book, Delphi 2009 Handbook. You can see it below:

I also realized Amazon US is selling the printed version for a very good discount. Right now the book is an sale for 38.07 USD comapred to the full price of 48.50 (a 22% discount, they claim). You can also buy the book together with Essential Pascal, not sure if this includes a further discount, I doubt. Here is a limited snapshot:

Embarcadero Technologies has announced a time-limited offer to try CodeGear RAD Studio 2009 and get the Delphi 2009 Handbook Free. The PDF version of the book, which was previously available only to registered users, will now be a free download also for those who install and register the trial version of RAD Studio 2009.

Needless to say you can buy the printed version of the Delphi 2009 Handbook (regardless of the version of Delphi you own) on both Amazon and Lulu.

I've finally found a few hours to get back my delphi.newswhat.com site, a front-end of Delphi NNTP newsgroups, up and running.

I've reactivated existing users (after doing some ANSI to UTF8 conversions at the file system level), enabled login, let new users create an account, and enabled posting messages from the site. Ive' clean up some of the HTML, including trimming the message text by moving from a <pre> tag to a more flexible formatting after using an XSTL recursive template for turning newlines in the XML document into <br> tags.

I'm also in the process of creating a different user interface for areas which are treated like read-only areas, including all CodeGear forums for which anonymous posting has been disabled, so it won't be possible to post to from my site (unless their forum policy changes). Still, you can browse CodeGear areas and post to many third party sites.

Sooner or later I'll also integrate some of the AJAX capabilities of my other site, dev.newswhat.com, which I don't know if I'll keep running... or just split to specific sites by topic.

Jim McKeeth has uploaded the video of the "Fun Side of Delphi" talk that I gave at the Delphi Live conference in San Jose last month. This is a "new edition" with Unicode, automatic translation, useless twitter applications, and more "fun" experiments made with Delphi 2009.

The 53 minutes video is avaialble on his delphi.org site at http://www.delphi.org/2009/06/fun-side-of-delphi-with-marco-cantu-at-delphi-live-2009/. I noticed (as someone pointed out) that at times audio and video are slightly out-of-synch. But it is very nice, anyway.

I've noticed an intetersting blog post about Delphi from Tim Anderson titled "Native code makes a comeback - except it never went away" on ITJOBBLOG, not his regular blog. The issue I see is that native code is still strong for core software, less for the application oriented development, in which developers need speed of development, keep costs and time under strict control, and have a working solution fast... despite its deployment and requirements. Still it is true that a nice and fast native user interface can be worth an extra effort.

The ADO.NET driver won't be further developed, as officially announced in the ADO.NET Team Blog. Originally missing in .NET 1.0, in which the SQL classes where specifically for Microsoft own SQL Server, the driver is being retired because (apparently) many customers use third-party drivers. Maybe because they really work better, or maybe because they don't fully trust Microsoft in providing support for a "competing" technology. And this move might prove them right.

The announcement in itself is really minor, from my point of view). The implication I see, though, is that this is another push towards Microsoft .NET lock-in strategy. The company is more than willing to give away the .NET runtime, and even a good portion of the development toolset, but having full control of the platform means pushing developers (not all of them of course, but quite a few) towards a complete Microsoft stack, from Office integration to SQL Server, from Exchange to its own online services. What it wrong about that? Absolutely nothing, from Microsoft's point of view. (for example, I remember a time Sun was trying to convince people they needed a Sparcstation because Java applications were slow).

The problem is that a large number of .NET developers (and also a few of the "luminaries") don't see this lock in. Nothing wrong in using .NET, but don't get just everything Microsoft gives you as a freeby. Everything has a cost, after all. With LINQ for SQL available for SQL Server only (at least, out of the box) and the Oracle driver gone, this is more and more apparent on the database side. But it is not the only case. And before you ask, no, the same is not true if you stick on the native Windows platform, which I consider very open... and on which you can find support (even from Microsoft) for most databases.

PS. Had CodeGear dared stopping to deliver a database driver for a competitor, Delphi developers would have staged a large protest (partially rightfully). I've seen complains for this Microsoft decision, but not really as much. But if I missed them, links would be appreciated.

I'm doing more experiments with Twitter (all via Delphi programs), which I find more and more interesting. First, I've restarted using my TweetOfTheDay application (a free download) for posting to the DelphiTweetDay account, which has 203 followers (that is, people receiving the status updates in their own Twitter home pages).

I'm experimenting with a "financial service" account were I post the dialy EUR to USD rate exchange. I guess it would make sense to have a full collection of financial data, posted to different accounts on Twitter, as this is the only way followers can pick what they are interested in, and not the full set. EUR to USD has 9 followers so far. Not sure if I'll keep working on this, until I find a way to promote it (at no cost, of course).

I started a nonsensetweets account that was blocked for too much twittering. Now I've got a second one, nonsensetweets2, to which I'm trying to post at the highest rate allowed by the system, a steady flow of one post every ten minutes telling what time it is. Made 3,687 posts so far. Most of its 48 followers did so to build traffic, using explicit sexual images, and most of them seem to be banned accounts. I'm wondering why these suspended accounts are not removed (or at least their pictures)...

Of course, I have my personal Twitter account, http://twitter.com/marcocantu, to which I post directly from the web and my phone and also (automatically) every time I blog. My main account has 284 followers, which is still much lower than the 1,170 average readers on my blog feed (according to Feedburner).

My personal Twitter status is surfaced also to Facebook (using the Twitter integration application) and to Plaxo (using its Facebook integration). So I post to my blog, some server side code I wrote sends the title and link to Twitter, Facebook picks it from Twitter, and Plaxo picks it from Facebook. As you can see, I'm trying to maximize my efforts. By the way, I registered my Facebook account as www.facebook.com/marcocantu. On Facebook I have 466 friends (of course, I don't know most of them!).

Well, this is a summary of my online activity these days, and if I'm blogging less, I'm certainly engaged in a more multi-faced online presence. But to get back to the original topic of this post, if you have interesting ideas for Twitter integration, need a helping hand to write the code of a Twitter-enabled program, or anything like that... feeel free to ask.

I found a very nice article, with an interview to Embarcadero CEO Wayne Williams, written by Tim Anderson and published in The Register. The article is titled Ex-Borland's Delphi owner re-ignites cross-platform dream and covers one of the key elements of the Delphi roadmap, the future support for native Mac and Linux development in Delphi.

In the interview, Wayne mentions the differences with the Kylix project, says Mac is growing a lot in the US (implying Linux is stronger in Europe), underlines cross-platform has higher priority than 64 bit support.

There is also a sesion of the interview on jBuilder and on the "slow-down" of the Eclipse project. That might spark some debate. Kudos to Tim Anderson for the very nice article.

This is my short report of the Delphi Tage 2009 that took place last Saturday in Hamburg, Germany. First of all, I really enjoyed this visit to northern Germany, an area I had not been to for over 20 years. I visited Lubeck (because my flight arrived at the local, very-tiny airport), spent two and a half days in Hamburg (very nice city!), and visited Celle (nice but way too touristic, for my taste) on the way to Hannover for my flight back home.

Tourism aside, the event was quite interesting, although I have to say I attended very few sessions as most were in German... and my knowledge of the language is too limited to follow a technical session. The most peculiar element of the event was its unusual location, as the conference was help on board of a ship. Here you can see (in images by Martin Strohal taken from www.delphi-treff.de), the ship, the main hall from the third florr balcony, and myself and other speakers during the final session:

The conference kick off was by David I, who repeated his "Status of Embarcadero and of Delphi" talk, that he gave also in Piacenza two days before, and is still taking around Europe (Russia at first, Italy, Germany, today UK, tomorrow Brussel, if I got it in the right order). Later it was a set of very nice technical sessions on 3 parallel tracks, enough to keep the 150 or so attendees busy. The sessions I saw were of very good quality, in depth, and full of information.

More images from this Flikr set (seems the author is Daniel Wischnewski) include a view form the speakers podium, David I, and a few pictures of of myself, 

For my REST clients session, I had a minor problem: There was no wi-fi on the ship. Luckily, I was able to make my cellphone SIM work with a data card I had... and could demo the programs live. I also covered my REST server architecture shortly. Hoep to have more published examples on both areas... for now refer to my Delphi REST clients collection.

By the way, the largest set of pictures is on the Delphi-Praxis site at this link. Overall, it was a very nice event, nice company (even if I skip some of the social events because I arrived late on the Friday and was with my wife later on). Thanks for the user group who organized this event and to CodeGear Germany who invited me. Hope to get back next year!

This is a short report of the Delphi event that took place in Piacenza last Thursday. I haven't posted it earlier because I went to Hamburg for the Delphi Tage event (a report will come to this blog), spent the weekend there, didn't want to spend a fortune for Internet connectivity, relaxed, and stayed offline for a few days).

The 2009 edition of the Italian Delphi Day was the 8th of the series and one of the smoothest and best attended. The conference hotel in Piacenza (my home town) saw a gathering of 120 Delphi developers, up from the 100 people of the last few editions. Despite the hectic schedule, speakers were very good in timing their sessions, and we managed to deliver a lot of information to the attendees in a single day.

You can find a good number of pictures of the event on Adrea Magni's Picasa site, at http://picasaweb.google.it/andrea.magni/DelphiDay2009. Here is the crowd, a couple of other images will follow -- hopefully they'll work from within the blog):

The first session was a "state of the art" keynote by David I, of Embarcadero Technologies. He covered the status of the company (the new owner of Delphi, since the event last year) and its the commercial offering, but delved also in the Delphi Roadmap announced recently (at the San Jose conference, as covered by this blog), demononstrated gesture support in a Delphi Weaver application and also the new Firebird native dbExpress driver. This is the first time this was shown in public, as far as I know.

Next there was an interesting session on the new Windows 7 APIs by Pietro Brambati of Microsoft Italia. He was very clear in telling the the future at the operating system level remains tied to the native C/C++ APIs, with .NET providing a layer on top of them. A lot of new services, like the new DirectX surfaces, used to be part of .NET only, and will now become available to us native developers ("us" meaning Delphi and C++ developers). The same is true for some of the WCF features for SAOP support.

I followed with a session highlighting some of the features of Delphi 2009, like advanced usage of generics and anonymous methods, along with Unicode, VCL improvements, and DataSnap 2009. After that I covered a few of my Delphi REST clients (see last week posts), and some more technical info from the San Jose conference preview sessions. After that, we had a nice lunch.

The afternoon was arranged with 8 short sessions focused on different Delphi components and tools, in two parallel tracks (a DB track and a generic one). It was a sort of a whirlwind, but most attendees seemed to like it. We had a final Q&A session, gave away a few freebies, and that was it.

The next morning, I repeated the "Status of Delphi" talk with a slight different (less technical) emphasis to the GO Conference, a gathering of 50 developers and resellers involved in an accounting and managament open source project written in Delphi, specific for the Italian market (at least for now!).