Farewell New York, Hello Salem
Today is our last full day in New York. The movers arrive tomorrow at 8 AM. We have almost everything packed. We ran out of boxes last night so we couldn’t finish.
I’m not sure how soon we will have Internet access from the new home. That’s one of my projects today…to schedule cable TV and Internet hook up. So don’t expect a quick reply to emails and forum postings for the next few days.
So how will we spend our final day in New York? We have a few more things to pack, and the DVR/cable boxes need to be returned to Time Warner. I’m meeting a good friend this afternoon for a quick happy hour drink followed by date night with my wife. We are going to dinner at the place of our first date. Unfortunately it won’t be a late night because the movers are coming early tomorrow but I’m sure it will still be a special time for us.
I thought leaving New York was going to be hard, but as it turns out I’m ready to go. The fact we spent our last weekend up in Vermont is probably a sign that we need to move. We just don’t enjoy the city the way we use too, and there are so many other things we want out of life that are hard to obtain from here unless you have lots of money. So it’s farewell to New York, hello Salem.
Delphi Job in Omaha, Nebraska
I received an email today regarding an immediate need for 3 to 4 Delphi consultants with XML experience to work on a client project in Omaha, Nebraska. Let me know if you are interested and I will put you in contact with the right person.
Bitwise Review of BDS
The January 2006 issue of the online magazine Bitwise Magazine has a good review of Borland Developer Studio. The reviewer makes some very good points, although I do not complete agree with one point, C# programmers will prefer Visual Studio. As someone who also writes code in C# I prefer BDS over Visual Studio. I’m more productive using a single IDE then using two separate IDE. Using two separate IDE means I have to remember two sets of the hotkeys, how-to’s, and so on.
Why NO Free Personal Edition of Borland Developer Studio?
A good friend of mine is interested in doing some Delphi programming for personal projects. Unfortunately he has no way of using the latest release of Delphi without spending money on a new user license. On the contrary, the hobbyist programmer who wishes to learn C# can download and use Microsoft’s Visual C# Express free of charge.
I’m always talking up the benefits of Delphi to my friends and I’m constantly telling other developers to give it a try. But the sad reality is that those interested in looking at Delphi for the first time or the hobbyist slash student who wants to use Delphi for personal projects and to learn cannot without spending lots of dollars for a new user license.
Get a clue Borland! Make a Personal Edition free for those programmers who wish to learn more about Delphi or use it for personal projects. And make it downloadable from your web site. You will have more Delphi customers in the long run if you do.
As for my friend, Borland has just lost a potential customer by not providing a freeware version Delphi.
Update: Seems I’m not the only one talking about the lack of a Personal Edition or trial version of Delphi. What about Delphi 2006 Trial and Personal?
Using DUnit with FinalBuilder
After installing FinalBuilder for the first time, I looked through the list of actions to see what 3rd party tools were supported. I was pleasantly surprised to see an action for every tool I use in software development except one, DUnit. I thought this was odd but I soon realized that DUnit is supported, just not as a custom action.
Follow these steps to use DUnit in FinalBuilder:
1) Add a Compile Delphi Win32 Project action to your FinalBuilder project.
2) Point the Compile Delphi action to your DUnit project and configure it as needed to compile the project.
3) Add an Execute Program action to the FinalBuilder project. This action is found under the Windows OS action group.
4) Point the action to the compiled bits from the Compile Delphi action. In other words, point it to your DUnit program.
5) Mark the Log Output option, which should be marked by default.
That’s it. FinalBuilder will run your DUnit unit tests as part of the build process and the output from the tests will be captured by FinalBuilder. And of course you can configure the FinalBuilder project to act accordingly based on the pass/fail result of your unit tests.
Some people might think FinalBuilder should have a custom action for DUnit. However, the action would only be a direct copy of the Execute Program action. Or maybe it would combine the Compile Delphi and Execute Program actions into a single action. But as you can see a custom action is not needed. DUnit unit tests are support through the Execute Program action and a custom action specific to DUnit would just be a waste of time for the folks at Vsoft Technologies. Their time is better spent adding support for more tools and adding more features to an already great product,
FinalBuilder.
Migrating from Visual Studio to Borland Developer Studio
I spent the day migrating various Visual Studio projects to Borland Developer Studio 2006. For the most part the projects easily moved over but I did have some problems with one project group.
This project group contains multiple C# library projects and an ASP.NET C# web application. The BDS converter for the project group did not set the parent reference for some of the .aspx and .ascx files. However, I was able to quickly fix this using a text editor.
One Visual Studio feature I do miss since moving to Borland Developer Studio is Copy Web Project. I really like this feature to xcopy an ASP.NET web application to a new directory that contains only the files needed for runtime. The Professional Edition of BDS does not have this feature. However, I was able to quickly clone this feature using FinalBuilder.
Right now I’m very happy with the move to Borland Developer Studio. Using one IDE for all my development work (Delphi, C# and ASP.NET 1.1) is making me a more productive software developer.
Delphi Live Templates for VB Developers
Nick Hodges has created a set of Delphi Live Templates for VB developers who have moved to Delphi. This templates work with the latest version of Borland Developer Studio. The developer to type VBish code and the templates spit out Delphi code. For instance, type “MsgBox” and you get “MessageDlg”.
SMTP Diagnostics Review
Heinz Tschabitscher posted a review about SMTP Diagnostics on About Email. I have to say I agree with Heinz when he says “SMTP Diagnostics does not help you understand or fix errors.” It is true SMTP Diagnostics will help you understand what is happening assuming you understand the protocol message, but the tool would be more useful if it explained things in plain English, which I believe is Heinz’s point.
New MicroISV Web Site
And the good stuff keeps coming from Bob. He just told me about a new web site for small software company that is going live today. Be sure to check it out.
Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality
Bob Walsh’s book Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality is finally on sale at Amazon. You can also buy the eBook version from directly from APress.