Delphi Blogs of the Week #2

January 24, 2014

Delphi Blogs of the Week #2

Another round of Delphi (but not only Delphi) blogs posts (and not only blog posts) I found this week. I guess I might already have to change title, but let's stick with it for now.

Let me start with Delphi and with some new features we made available to XE5 users:

I blogged earlier in the week about the updated version of reFind in hotfix 4
Sarina blogged yesterday about a new the KitKat style (blogs.embarcadero.com/sarinadupont/2014/01/23/android-kitkat-style-download-for-xe5) available to registered users at cc.embarcadero.com/Item/29701
A new Delphi app in both app stores (and based on same code). It is a freehand drawing app, with a couple of nice features. See blog post (in Italian, written by two friends) at blog.delphiedintorni.it/2014/01/freedrawing-disponibile-su-apple-store.html. The apps are in Italian, but rather simple to use anyway... and the links are in the article.
Thierry has the second post of his design series at blogs.embarcadero.com/tlaborde/2014/01/24/the-fridays-design-2-firemonkey-desktop-design-with-delphi-xe5/
Many videos on Delphi XE5 Android development in Spanish at josecastilloreyes.blogspot.it/2014/01/tutoriales-moviles-en-espanol.html
Loading the app’s icon into a TImage on Android at delphihaven.wordpress.com/2014/01/18/loading-the-apps-icon-into-a-timage-on-android/

A quite new and interesting web site collecting information on FireMonkey by several blogs can be found at www.fmxexpress.com/. Seems really complete. Kudos to the author.

Beside Delphi, a big event in the developers blog sphere of this week was the discussion about hos Microsoft lost developers trust. This was started by this Facebook post (www.facebook.com/dsobeski/posts/10153683440480008) and continued for example on Slashdot (at www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1vvp3l/trust_users_and_the_developer_division_what_went/). But I find Tim Anderson to have a rather balanced view of the matter at www.itwriting.com/blog/7979-microsoft-and-developer-trust.html. Needless to say this is an important topic for any Windows developer, including Delphi ones.

posted by marcocantu @ 5:52PM | 3 Comments [0 Pending]

Delphi Blogs of the Week 2

David Sokeski's article, "Trust, Users and The 
Developer Division", was a fascinating read. I work as 
a firmware developer but have done quite a bit of 
software development as well, using both Microsoft 
Visual Studio and, more recently, Delphi. I can 
honestly say that I feel much the same way regarding 
what CodeGear (now EMB) did with the release of Delphi 
2009.

The core software application I still maintain for our 
company was originally written in Borland Turbo Pascal 
and evolved over the years until it reach it's current 
version, written in Delphi 2007. Although we were 
interested in taking advantage of new features 
introduced in more recent versions, the time (aka 
cost) required to rework the low-level communication 
protocols to use TBytes or AnsiStrings was difficult, 
if not impossible, to justify to management. While 
many other applications could likely be ported over 
with little or no work, our software interacts 
directly with a micro-controller which requires that a 
single character or an array of 8-bit characters 
remain 8-bit.

I understand Unicode is ultimately the way things 
should move, but forcing developers to do so caused me 
to lose trust in the makers of Delphi. That's one of 
the primary reasons all of our new software 
development projects are being done in Visual Studio.

Comment by A.J. van de Ven [] on January 25, 00:12

Delphi Blogs of the Week 2

Unfortunately Embarcadero also did same thing 
regarding Delphi. NET

Comment by Burhan on January 25, 00:16

Delphi Blogs of the Week 2

I'm not saying that moving to Unicode strings wasn't a hassle, but 
considering you can take an existing unit and replace occurrences of 
string/char/PChar with AnsiString/AnsiChar/PAnsiChar and migrate the 
bulk of you code (keeping it Ansi-based)... I don't think this compares to 
the kind of changes .NET and Microsoft libraries have gone through in 
the same time frame.

Regarding embracing and later abandoning .NET, it is true Embarcadero 
did it, upsetting some developers.

-Marco

Comment by Marco Cantu [http://www.marcocantu.com] on January 27, 17:41

Marco Tech Blog

Delphi Blogs of the Week #2

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Delphi Blogs of the Week 2

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