Delphi Developer Notes

Finally closing this blog

2007-09-24T11:01:00.000+02:00

Well, it is about time to close this blog officially, however, not without starting a new blog on my own server. So yes, I will start blogging again and I will write about Programming with Delphi (and C#) as well as other aspects of my life.

The new blog supports categories and is just starting, so you have not missed anything so far ;-)

To read my new blog, go to http://www.gumpi.com/ and start reading.

Thanks to all readers in the past, and hello to all readers to come.

* * * THIS BLOG IS CLOSED NOW * * *

Kick-Start database models

2006-11-13T11:58:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me an interesting link. Barry Williams has provided the community a wide ranging set of "kick start database models", which allow you to get a little head start when creating new database designs for projects. For many different topics you'll find the basic diagrams. Over all you'll find currently about 400 diagrams, a list still being updated over time.

Link: Database Answers: 'Kick-Start' Data Models

Thanks to the whole BDS Team

2006-11-06T17:44:00.000+01:00

Today a personal note from me to the whole BDS team over at Borland / DTG!

The last months haven't been very kind on me and took more time from my personal life then I would have liked to commit to anything. I didn't even find the time and nerves to tell the team itself since I took some responsibilities on and couldn't work them as needed.

However, today I got a package delivered with FedEx and I'll let the pictures speak. Now, this box has seen quiet a lot Delphi people, the letter states the whole team.

THANKS!!!

Borland DTG comes near your home town

2006-11-04T15:49:00.000+01:00

The Borland DTG Germany is again on the road and coming to three towns this time. To Cologne (Köln) on November 21^st, to Lucern (Switzerland) on November 23^rd, and to Dresden on November 29^th. Be sure to come and visit us when possible.

You'll get a DTG update, information on Peleton and InterBase 2007. Daniel Magin and I will talk to you about migrating your old Delphi 7 (and older) VCL applications to BDS 2006 and VCL.NET. We will also talk about the upcoming Vista release (I hope I'll get the final build from MS next week) and how to prepare your VCL apps for that.

So, register and come visit us: http://www.devtracks.de/

Running the BDS 2006 IDE against MS.NET 2.0

2006-11-04T15:32:00.000+01:00

Hello,

now before you all get hyped, first the disclaimer: RUN AT OWN RISK, YOU CAN DESTROY YOUR BDS SETUP WHEN NOT FOLLOWING THIS INFO TO THE LETTER!

A week ago a friend of mine told me, that he has his IDE running against the MS.NET 2.0 framework, rather than the MS.NET 1.1 framework. And thanks to a much better J# implementation Togehter runs much smoother, less memory consumption, faster reaction times, etc... Sounds great? Well, it is great!

Now, where is the drawback? Simple, it will only work for Delphi Win32 and C++ Builder. Do not attempt to use those steps against the full BDS or any of the .NET personalities. With high possibility you will destroy your whole BDS installation and with some luck your Windows setup as well. Not scared, then read on!

Copy your $(BDS)\Bin\bds.exe and name the copy bds2.exe. Do the same with the bds.exe.config and name it bds2.exe.config. Open the bds2.config file and look for the node-entry configuration\startup. Change the value of the version attribute to version="v2.0.50727". Now, you have to have the MS.NET Framework installed, start the BDS2.EXE with the paramater -pDelphi for the Delphi Win32 personality and enjoy.

So far I have not hit any problems using that little feature, just more fun!

P.S.: I'll now start blogging more again, sorry for the long off-time.
-- Daniel

Google Code Search finally...

2006-10-25T12:53:00.000+02:00

while I have been rarely online and working with Delphi in the last weeks for personal reasons, I just noticed that Google Code Search finally supports Delphi as language :-)

Google Code Search

The logs again...

2006-10-15T14:15:00.000+02:00

Well, I was asked for the current statistics and here they are (just our server)

prereqs.exe: 1
prereqs.zip: 810
prereqs_de.zip: 166
prereqs_en.zip: 19
prereqs_fr.zip: 2
prereqs_jp.zip: 1
prereqsde.zip: 890
prereqsen.zip: 1
prereqsfr.zip: 31
prereqsjp.zip: 43
turbo_de.iso.zip: 1
turbocpp.exe: 484
turbocpp_de.exe: 474
turbocpp_de.iso.zip: 209
turbocpp_en.exe: 91
turbocpp_en.iso.zip: 58
turbocpp_fr.exe: 14
turbocpp_fr.iso.zip: 6
turbocpp_jp.exe: 49
turbocpp_jp.iso.zip: 5
turbocppcd.png: 95
turbocsharp.exe: 295
turbocsharp_de.exe: 317
turbocsharp_de.iso.zip: 141
turbocsharp_en.exe: 14
turbocsharp_en.iso.zip: 31
turbocsharp_fr.exe: 7
turbocsharp_fr.iso.zip: 2
turbocsharp_jp.exe: 32
turbocsharp_jp.iso.zip: 4
turbocsharpcd.png: 65
turbodelphi.exe: 721
turbodelphi_de.exe.zip: 1
turbodelphi_de.exe: 1469
turbodelphi_de.iso.zip: 599
turbodelphi_en.exe: 44
turbodelphi_en.iso.zip: 185
turbodelphi_fr.exe: 25
turbodelphi_fr.iso.zip: 6
turbodelphi_jp.exe: 44
turbodelphi_jp.iso.zip: 6
turbodelphi4net.exe: 253
turbodelphi4net_de.exe: 381
turbodelphi4net_de.iso.zip: 204
turbodelphi4net_en.exe: 21
turbodelphi4net_en.iso.zip: 46
turbodelphi4net_fr.exe: 11
turbodelphi4net_fr.iso.zip: 3
turbodelphi4net_jp.exe: 24
turbodelphi4net_jp.iso.zip: 3
turbodelphi4netcd.png: 71
turbodelphicd.png: 185
Total Downloads: 17320

Summary of the EKON X and EuroDevCon 2006 at Frankfurt/Germany

2006-09-29T18:27:00.000+02:00

Well, sorry for being late with this entry, however, finally it comes to your screen and it brings you a few pictures I've taken during the EKON 10 in Frankfurt this week.

First off! It was a lot of fun and great to see all of you again this year. Be sure to drop me an email if you have been there and have visited one of my sessions at dwischnewski {at} gmail [dot] com. I'd love to know what you've liked, and what could'n should be improved. I actually got a few requests to do one of those sessions in English next time so I'll have to think about that.

But now, I just want to show some of the pictures and drop a few words here and there as apropriate ;-)

First I want to show you a few pictures I've taken during the technical keynote of the EKON. To bad I missed those other keynotes.

On this image you see the speakers of the panel, that actually did show some live coding during the keynote. On the left, you see Jon Harrison, who demoed "Peleton", the next version of JBuilder based upon the Eclipse framework. He did a small web service demo, which he designed using an UML diagram. This diagram he exported as XML file. He then "skyped" this file to Gerard van der Pol, who imported that into ECO and wrote the same web service using ECO and Delphi. Cool stuff!
To their right are David "DavidI" Intersimone and Nick Hodges. David talked a little about the road maps while Nick Hodges demoed Highlander (.NET 2.0) and (yeah!!!) NDataStore. It seems like DTG will resurrect NDataStore (and JDataStore with it). I dearly hope so, it would be a great feature to have.

And thank you Gerard for using my Community Welcome Page!

DavidI wore during most of the session his cool new Sushi Chef head band he got from one of the japanese employees of DTG. The symbols on it are bringing luck to the wearer.

The keynote was directed by Jason Vokes, a great member of the European DTG group.

Masoud Kamali, the founder and managing director of the Software and Support Verlag, which held the EKON conference, was speaking a few words to the audience too.

Hey Jeremy, this picture is just for you!

Further they told us not to expect the Compact Framework support in the IDE with the release of Highlander, but some time after that. Probably as download for the registered users.

Next part I want to show some pictures is the CodeCamp. The CodeCamp session allows the attendees to ask specific questions to their problems to the speakers of the conference. There were different tables set up, each table with a specific topic.

However, before the CodeCamp actually started, the team of Masoud surprised him and the audience with a small party for the 10th anniversary of the EKON conference. So, they asked those attendees who have visited all ten EKON conferences to come upfront. All of those are invited for free the year, congratulations to them!

They had a real big cake too. This one lasted for two days until it was either all finished or they simply thought the rest was to old to eat. Who knows ;) It was good but very, very sweet. I only had one piece which will last me quiet some time I guess.

And here you see Daniel Wolf, administrator of the Delphi-PRAXiS and author and maker of some of the famous BDS/Turbo videos enjoying his beer at the CodeCamp.

Now just some images from the EKON with no more words ;-)

Dynamic Action Menu Items on the Fly

2006-09-29T18:25:00.000+02:00

At the CodeCamp session of the EKON a visitor of the conference came up to me asking me, how to populate a totaly empty action main menu with menus and sub menus. Most of you have seen the action manager components and used them, however usually only, or at least mostly using the visual tools of the IDE.

I guess we were sitting there about one or two hours (off and on) trying to solve their problem. We even asked quiet a few more conference attendees if they would know a solution to the problem. All in all, I guess, we were 8 people trying to figure that one out - to no success. So later, I wrote one of the people I really know they love the action components and asked for his advice and he basically wrote back, that even he does not know a solution to this problem. Btw, using various search engines didn't offer any success either.

Now, two days later, sitting in a session of Marco Cantù on Web 2.0 stuff, it hit me straight into the face. And the solution is actually rather simple. If you simply drop an action main menu on your form, you'll have to add a new action bar to your action manager and connect this with the menu. Now you can go ahead and add menu items to it. To create sub menus within a menu, you have to create a new TContainedAction and assign that to the menu item. Further, you have to set the caption of the TActionMenuItem separately. I have added a sample to Borlands CodeCentral for you to download. It does everything programatically and should be easily adaptable for your purposes.

CodeCentral: download for registered members (Delphi 2006 and C++Builder 2006)

Analyzing the Logs...

2006-09-08T14:50:00.000+02:00

Well, the last days were tuff on my download server, I guess. I got around and finally wrote a small analyzer tool, which waded through the log files and counted all files together. It has dropped most canceled downloads and counted those done with a download manager only once. Well, following the numbers:

prereqs.zip: 550
prereqsde.zip: 703
prereqsfr.zip: 16
prereqsjp.zip: 37
turbocpp.exe: 464
turbocpp_de.exe: 348
turbocpp_fr.exe: 11
turbocpp_jp.exe: 47
turbocsharp.exe: 232
turbocsharp_de.exe: 226
turbocsharp_fr.exe: 6
turbocsharp_jp.exe: 31
turbodelphi.exe: 766
turbodelphi_de.exe: 851
turbodelphi_fr.exe: 25
turbodelphi_jp.exe: 48
turbodelphi4net.exe: 200
turbodelphi4net_de.exe: 266
turbodelphi4net_fr.exe: 11
turbodelphi4net_jp.exe: 22
Total: 9720

This averages for a total traffic of 3.8 Terrabytes. Good that I don't have to pay the traffic ;-)

ISO Images online

2006-09-08T12:49:00.000+02:00

Just wanted to let you know, that we finally have the ISO images of the Turbo products online, too. Further you'll find PDF files for printing CD labels.

The downloads have somewhat slowed down, so you should get good traffic again, without having to use BitTorrent or similar tools. ;-)

All Turbo Explorer Products

Want more than one Turbo on your PC?

2006-09-08T08:47:00.000+02:00

Well, Andreas has done it again. He provided yet another tool for your PC. This one will allow you to install different Turbo Explorer products on your PC. Since he does not have Turbo Professional licenses he cannot test his product against those. Therefore try that on your own risk ;)

His blog entry and download

Want to see the DP-Server image?

2006-09-06T18:08:00.000+02:00

Well, I just had a laugh. Our administrator just published an image showing the server load. The lower spikes show the normal high life moments on the server, usually 70 to 100 users maximum within the last 5 minutes. Well guess when we started publishing the Turbo mirrors...

FYI: the Delphi-PRAXiS is the largest German language Delphi-Forum and hosts the information page for my download server (a different one!).

FYI 2: we expect to hit the 1 Terrabyte turbo traffic by noon tomorrow.

FYI 3: If you get a "service unavailable" message from our servers, try again later. It simply meens that the connection limit is reached.

Sorry for all who just got kicked

2006-09-06T14:29:00.000+02:00

We have upped the band width from 90 MBit/s to 96 MBit/s, however, I have set the connection limit to 500 users. We just reached 900 concurrent connections, which left each downloader less than 10 KB/s. Now, each connection should get around 18KB/s. Still not much, but better than getting less and less each few minutes as numbers just started to sky-rocket.

Sorry to all who have to wait, but it is better once you get your slot ;)

Turbo ISO images

2006-09-06T13:06:00.000+02:00

Well, we are getting ready to put the ISO images for the Turbo editions online. However, stay put as this will be finished some time tomorrow, I guess. Currently we leave the bandwidth to all you downloaders, so uploading the turbos (from Borland servers on fire) to our server will take a while longer ;-)

Server on Fire...

2006-09-06T12:11:00.000+02:00

Well, the Turbos are in real demand. Our download server is scratching its limits. I had to limit the download bandwidth to 90% of the overall band width available, since we still have paying customers on the server ;-)

The front-end of the downloads, the Delphi-PRAXiS server is sweating and catching fire. Our administrator has put this new logo on the top bar.

Also interesting, the list of users online today (at noon). It says: 7825 users visited today: 905 registered, 106 hidden, 6814 guests. 1757 uses in the last hour. Below a list of the registered users of the day....

Last, but not least an image of the network traffic on our server :-o

Turbo Editions are online

2006-09-05T22:14:00.000+02:00

Well, just a few minutes ago, the Turbo editions of the Borland Developer Studio were officially available for download.

Demand was so huge, that some already figured out the correct links a few hours ago. But feel free to get them now.

For members of the Delphi-PRAXiS free downloads are available through one of our Frankfurt based servers.

Home Page: turboexplorer.com
Downloads: Official Download Sites

Turbo media seen "in the wild"

2006-09-04T11:58:00.000+02:00

Today the DTG of Borland has a DevTrack show in Hamburg, Germany. What do you think they will have in the raffle? Right, Turbo products. And here for you real pictures (mobile phone cam) of the products... (click for larger version)

WPF and .NET 3.0 with BDS 2006?

2006-09-03T18:33:00.000+02:00

I just ran across one interesting post that shows how you can access WPF and other .NET 3.0 features using the BDS 2006.

Okay, it is an quiet easy sample, and question will be would you want to do larger ones this way, but it is possible.

Read the post on Bob's Delphi Stuff

View your Pocket PC on your PC

2006-09-02T21:45:00.000+02:00

Yesterday a friend of mine mentioned an interesting application to me, that mirrors your pocket pc screen live onto your desktop. This is a really interesting feature when you want to demo your application to a larger audience as you can simply use a beamer for showing the whole setup to your audience.

The tool is available for free from Microsoft.

Questions about the Turbos?

2006-09-01T21:26:00.000+02:00

Well, if you are still not sure about the Turbos, what to expect, what you'll get, what you wont get, then you should read through the FAQ Borland has provided.

Read the FAQ!

OpenSource ISAPI Extension Loader for Debugging

2006-08-25T13:09:00.000+02:00

This is the second installment, as an afterthought to OpenSource ISAPI Filter Loader for Debugging. Just as updating Filters normally forces you to restart your IIS, so does updating an extension.

How does it work?

When you setup the ISAPI Filter for your web site, instead of deploying your ISAPI extension, you will deploy mine. Rename my ISAPI extension so, that it matches the name of your DLL. So, if your DLL is called SomeISAPIExtension.dll, name mine SomeISAPIExtension.dll, too.

Now rename your ISAPI extension to SomeISAPIExtension.upd, short for update. ;-) When the IIS sends the next request to my ISAPI extension, it will look for your update. It will then rename it to SomeISAPIExtension.run and load it into memory and pass all requests along.

When you have another update, copy it as SomeISAPIExtension.upd into the same directory. Within 10 seconds (default, or 500ms debug-mode) my ISAPI extension will look for the update. Finding one, it will unload the current extension and rename it to SomeISAPIExtension.bak, rename yours to SomeISAPIExtension.run and load it. Then, your new version will start to handle all requests. NOTE: This process can take upto one minute. All incoming calls are pooled and passed to the new version as soon as it is loaded.

I created this little tool as an afterthought just now. As it turned out, Egg-Loader is for those extensions and not for filters. I hope you enjoy it, too. There are some things that can be done to enhance it for debugging, and it is not designed for live services!

Download at Borland CodeCentral: ISAPI Extension Loader for Debugging.

OpenSource ISAPI Filter Loader for Debugging

2006-08-25T10:32:00.000+02:00

A member of our German Delphi community, had a problem with a product named Egg-Loader. What does it do?

Well, basically it is an ISAPI Filter which routes requests from the IIS to your ISAPI Filter. When you have an update of your Filter, you copy it into the directory where the current one is deployed, but with the extension .update instead off .dll. The Egg-Loader will then unload the current version and use the updated instead. I wrote such a tool a long time ago, for myself. Now, I decided to open-source it. It has done a great job in developing our in-house software Content ACE v3 and v4.

How does it work?

When you setup the ISAPI Filter for your IIS, instead of pointing IIS to your ISAPI Filter, you will have to point it to mine. Rename my ISAPI Filter so, that it matches the name of your DLL. So, if your DLL is called SomeISAPIFilter.dll, name mine SomeISAPIFilter.dll, too.

Now rename your ISAPI Filter to SomeISAPIFilter.upd, short for update. ;-) When the IIS sends the next request to my ISAPI Filter, it will look for your update. It will then rename it to SomeISAPIFilter.run and load it into memory and pass all requests along.

When you have another update, copy it as SomeISAPIFilter.upd into the same directory. Within 10 seconds (default, or 500ms debug-mode) my ISAPI Filter will look for the update. Finding one, it will unload the current Filter and rename it to SomeISAPIFilter.bak, rename yours to SomeISAPIFilter.run and load it. Then, your new version will start to handle all requests.

This little tool has helped me a lot during development. I hope you enjoy it. There are some things that can be done to enhance it for debugging, and it is not designed for live services!

Download at Borland CodeCentral: ISAPI Filter Loader for Debugging.

Two of you have downloaded before the latest update *g* The community member just told me more details about his problem. My version had the same problem. This is fixed now *g* How is that for support?

And yet another video

2006-08-24T21:25:00.000+02:00

While Marco Cantù has blogged about two nice videos I stumbled across another old goodie from the Delphi 3 CD. You remember when back then they wanted to rule space and make earth a better place to live on...?

YouTube: Delphi 3 CD goodie

Late, but do not miss

2006-08-23T19:38:00.000+02:00

Today, at 12 pm PDT Jason Vokes will be online with Nick Hodges on the Delphi Hour. This is 9 PM CET, about 90 minutes from now.

Do not miss!

Spread the word, Nick told us kinda late this time...
Link to Event Central