Quietly blogging

I happened across this blog http://gloriaho.blogspot.com/, from a young girl in Hong Kong who keeps a very close eye on Borland, Delphi, and the Delphi newsgroups.  She's a new Delphi programmer (since 2002) and certainly enjoys using it.  It's always great to see new, excited users of Delphi.  Unfortunately, she is not able to attend BorCon this year since she has to take care of her grandmother.  At least she has her priorities straight; family should always come first.

Corporate Roadmap

While Danny got to take part in all those most excellent team building excercises for the first two days of the offsite meeting, I was able to attend on the final day, yesterday (August 18, 2004).  It was a day full of buzzword bingo (I lost count of the number of full cards I got ;-), but one thing you can say for Boz (Sr. VP of Product Development), is that he's a doer not just a talker.  You know how there's those little survey cards you fill out at every conference?  I was pleasently surprised that he (Boz), took them very seriously.  After they were all collected, the data was compiled and in the closing session the results were presented.  It was very open, honest and sincere.  Also, at each session we were to identify specific “next steps” to take and actually assign action items to certain individuals with a real deadline to meet. 

I've been to several of these off-site meetings over the years thae I've been at Borland, and frankly, they've been nearly useless.  We didn't spend a lot of time actually discussing the business, or the processes, in concrete, directly applicable terms.  This one was a total blitz of corporate strategy, competitive analysis, customer feedback, true concrete next steps, etc...

I also have to give a few kudos to Pat Kerpan, the CTO.  He lead the technical track and all the CS's (and myself, the lone Principal Architect ;), went through several key development issues, future directions, competitive responses.  Pat did an excellent job of both keeping everyone on track and out of ratholes.  He also seemed to know when a few rabbit-chases might reveal something fruitful.

While I did, miss some of the opening day sessions, the recap was reasonably thorough, and with a few crib notes from Michael Swindell, I was able to navigate the ocean of TLAs. If you'd like to get a glimpse at what came from these meetings, you can attend BorCon this year and we'll be beginning to talk about some of these things.

Whew! I suppose I should get back to work on helping to get Delphi ready to show at BorCon... See you there!

Comment spam...

I'm sure that the readers of this site have noticed the sudden deluge of comment spam that seems to have been inflicted upon this site.  I've had to start a morning ritual of deleting these bogus posts (and, unfortunately, any post that replies to them).  Of course, now that I've commented on them, they'll probably start kickin' it up a notch and increase the traffic.  I'm going to request that we change the comment system to require that the commenter have a BDN account.  This way, if there are any abuses, we can simply turn off their account.  I hate to have to push for this, but this is yet another thing that is going to be ruined by a few jerks out there.  I haven't turned off allowing comments for now since the number of these messages hasn't become too burdensome... just annoying.

More Diamondback information

Looks like the proverbial cat is beginning to claw its way out of the bag.  If you want some more juicy tidbits about Diamondback, the next version of Delphi, check out Michael's blog entry here: http://homepages.codegear.com/mswindell/2004/08/diamondback-rumors.html

 

Whew.. Diamondback will be at Borcon

Finally... Stuff is starting to dribble out about the next version of Delphi, code-named Diamondback.  To get the real scoop, however, you really need to be at this year's Borland Conference in San Jose, California.  I'll be doing the general “What's new in Delphi” session.  This will cover all the new cool IDE features that won't be covered by other sessions.  So, if you look here http://bdn.borland.com/article/0,1410,32499,00.html, you can get a hint at what features you might expect to hear about and see at the conference.  Also, you certainly don't want to miss the Monday night “Meet the team” session... trust me, you want to be there.

For information on how to sign-up for the conference and the costs, check out http://info.borland.com/conf2004/.
For information on the various tracks and sessions that will be presented, go to http://info.borland.com/conf2004/tracks/allsessions.html

Again, Monday September 13th at 8:00pm  is the must see event of the conference... esspecially for the Delphi programmers.

Delphi Basics..

Sometimes perusing through the public newsgroups will reveal some real gems among the rough.  Take for instance, there is current a very civilized and informative discussion currently taking place in borland.public.delphi.non-technical regarding different ways to make it easier for the Visual Basic programmer to move to Delphi.  One such thing that came up was this web site, http://www.delphibasics.co.uk/.  If you're looking to start programming in Delphi, this is a fantastic starting point.

I am not Danny, nor is Danny, I

Danny has found an interesting link to a bit of satire regarding the “pollution” of the Pascal language by Borland and Delphi.  However, once again, this blog post has mentioned this blog, yet the link is to Delphi Compiler Core.  Of course Danny recognized this and even mentioned it in his post.  So I just can't let this one go by without a comment.. ;-)

Mark Edington is now blogging

Well it looks like another cohort in crime has come out of the woodwork to place their mark on the blogging world. Mark Edington is now up and running with this whole blogging thing. Mark is another one of the "old-timers" on the team. He's been around since before the initial development of Delphi. Welcome aboard Mark!

Message methods in Delphi for .NET

Just got bit by this little oddity in how Delphi for .NET handles message methods. What is wrong with the following because it will compile?

TBaseClass = class(TWinControl)
procedure WMLButtonDown(var Message: TWMLButtonDown); message WM_LBUTTONDOWN;
end;

TNewClass = class(TBaseClass)
procedure WMLButtonDown(var Message: TMessage); message WM_LBUTTONDOWN;
end;

...

procedure TBaseClass.WMLButtonDown(var Message: TWMLButtonDown);
begin
inherited;
{ special processing here }
end;

procedure TNewClass.WMLButtonDown(var Message: TWMLButtonDown);
begin
inherited;
{ more special procesing here }
end;

It seems that the compiler will generate a raw call to the inherited method when it sees the "inherited" keyword without doing anything with the paramter. The ancestor's message handler will now treat the TMessage parameter as if it were a TWMLButtonDown message cracker. This wreaks havoc on the .NET runtime, but not in the way one would expect. One would possibly expect exceptions like invalid casts. However there is actually no telling what might happen. It actually react just as randomly as if you'd taken a random Integer value and cast it to an object reference then proceeded to call methods or dereference it. Now, of course the above code doesn't pass PEVerify, and had I actually thought to do that I would have seen the problem. So for all you component developers out there moving your Delphi components to Delphi 8 for .NET, just keep this in mind. You should declare your descendant message methods to match the ancestor's declaration (even though it is not required in Delphi for Win32). Yes, Danny and I are going to be working on some solutions to this delima for a future Delphi for .NET release.

Busy days...

You have probably noticed that there has been a drop in the flow of posts. There are several reasons for this. Most noteably is the fact that there isn't too much new information at this point that I can talk about. Then there is the fact that we're currently in the midst of approaching some internal milestones and much of my focus has to be on meeting those goals. No, I can't tell you what the milestones are and what their for... Sorry. As soon as I have some new juicy bits of information, tips or tricks, I'll try and get them posted here. For now, however, there will be a dearth of posts...