Unofficial, unscientific, "just curious" survey.

For all those that attended Borcon, and esspecially those that attended the Diamondback Preview/Meet the Team session on Monday evening, what was your opinion of the format?  Did you like the “fair” style format where you could walk up directly to different areas where the team members were sitting and talk directly with them.  What about the “blip-vert” demos prior to the breakout?  As a data point, I've already gotten some feedback that it was very well received.  I think we'll probably keep that format for the next few years at BorCon (depending upon how many of the engineers we can drag to the conference and where it takes place).

Finished and winding down...

I just completed my second iterration of my What's New in Diamondback presentation.  I was pleased that a whole new crowd showed up.  That gave me a chance to cover all my favority bits of Diamondback (read: the bits I worked on ;-)..  I went over the resurrection of the VCL floating designer, true drag-n-drop development (you can now actually drag a component from the tool palette onto the form).  The IDE now again also supports multiple editor windows as before.  The ASP.NET and WinForms designers remain embedded.

One of my favorite features is called SyncEdit.  If you've ever used recent versions of JBuilder, you have probably seen this feature.  Basically you select a block of code and and a little button appears in the gutter indicating that SyncEdit mode is available.  When you press the button, the Editor changes modes by highlighting the block a little differently, parses the marked block and highlights all the common identifiers within the block. Now when you edit one of these identifiers, all the others are also changed simultaneously.  You can then press tab to move between each ident.

Then there is refactoring.  This works not only within the entire project (even throughout units that are not specifically part of the project), but across projects within the same project group.  For instance if you rename a public type or some other symbol in a C# assembly that is referenced by a Delphi for .NET project, and that Delphi project references that particular symbol, then it will also be refactored as well!

Lots-o-debugging ehhancements are also on the way.  Better stack tracing. Better breakpoint window; added a toolbar, inplace editing of the breakpoint condition and pass counts, and a checkbox to quickly enable/disable a breakpoint.  You can now also simultaneously debug a Win32 application and a .NET application within the same project group.  Through a bit of finagling, you can also debug both Win32 and .NET within the same process!  This is great for folks who are using a Win32 application in which the CLR is hosted.  Such as the Diamondback IDE itself.

I haven't even touched on all the new ASP.NET, VCL, database, DBWeb, etc.. enhancements.  For more information you can check out the various “live” bloggers that were covering the sessions as they were happening.  There's probably more, but Google and Technorati haven't discovered them yet.

Nick Hodges
Robert Love
Joe White
Dr. Bob
Jim McKeeth
Marco Cantu
Craig Stuntz
Paul Gustavson

Blogger requests

Danny has posted a good bit of information and request to all you “live” bloggers out there feverishly tapping away at your keyboard while in the middle of a presentation.  He make some very good points and a couple of requests as well.  Since Danny and I do actually talk quite a bit, we both agree that the “live” blogging that is taking place at this year's Borland Conference, is great and we don't want to discourage it at all.  We've both been “live” blogged at each of our sessions, so we'd like to be able to use some of the blogsphere tools out there to find out who's linking to our blogs.  So please make sure you include a link to the author's website or blog URL when you post your blog entry.  Keep up the information flowing!

Nick Hodges takes Spirit of Delphi award

Every year for the past several years, Borland has presented a special award to different Delphi users and luminaries for their outstanding support of Delphi.  They are well-respected within the Delphi community.  At this year's Diamondback preview and Meet the Delphi Team sesstions, the award was presented to non other than Nick Hodges.  Congratulations, Nick!  This is a very well-deserved award.

BorCon presentation..

Well the first installment of my talk is now over.  I'm now sitting in Danny's talk waiting for him to start.  He's going to go into the deeper details of what's new in the Delphi compiler.  This isn't just the .NET compiler, BTW.  I'm sure that there will be others doing the “live” blog thing.  Robert Love, who's sitting next to me in the front row right now, did a live blog of my talk.  You can read about it here.

Nick's Preconference Tutorial - Live

I'm sitting here in Nick Hodges' Preconference tutorial on Creating Custom ASP.NET Components in Delphi.  Nick is a very engaging presenter (somewhat of an odd statement since I am sitting here writing about his talk ;-).  Since I don't work directly with the ASP.NET stuff on a daily basis, I figured I could probably learn a thing or two.  So far Nick is able to draw some keen analogies to how the traditional Delphi developer can view custom component construction for ASP.NET.  The guts of ASP.NET component creation is quite complex, but Nick is able to break it down so that you're not overwhelmed with that complexity.  Good job, Nick!

Now for the obligatory Diamondback plug ;-).  Nick is using Diamondback in his presentation and so far I've only seen one case where he's had to restart the IDE, and one other case of an error dialog.  And he's almost done with the tutorial.  With four hours of heavy IDE usage, add in the attacking demo gremlins, it seems to be holding up quite well.

Pre-conference Day 1.

I just finished attending day one of the Preconference Tutorials at this year's Borland Conference.  I attended Danny's talk about .NET 2.0 and John Kaster's talk, Overview of Diamondback.  I like sitting in the back and work on my own presentation because I can also see what they've covered, guage the audience reaction so that I can get a feel for what I should concentrate on in my own talk.  Looks like the IDE stuff was one of the hottest tickets.  But then again maybe I'm a little biased ;-)..  If you want to know what was covered in Danny's talk this morning, Nick has a great summary of all the hot bits.  I'm almost done with my own slides and was able to pare them down to under 50.  I will probably do more demos in between a lot of the slides.  I still don't know if 1:15 is enough time.  John Kaster was unable to get through even half of his 218 or so slides in the four hours of his precon tutorial!  So if you're at the conference, I may have to split my one talk into a part I and a part II.  I'm scheduled for a repeat on Wednesday, but may have to use the Wednesday talk as a continuation.  This all depends on the how well things go Monday.  I'll try and post again tomorrow, once I decide who's talk to crash and heckle ;-)

BorCon prep.

We're currently scrambling to complete all those last minute details you always forget in preparation for this year's Borland Conference.  I'm finalizing the slides for my presentations, “What's New in Diamondback.”  By all counts this is going to be one memorable conference.  I hope to be giving some daily updates regarding the conference.  Maybe even post some photos.

Shotgun fix for .NET 1.1 SP1...

The following was posted by Roy Nelson as a way to get Delphi 8 back up and going with .NET 1.1 SP1.  Please note that this is a “shotgun” fix and has not been verified by Borland QA, so your mileage may vary:

1) delete all *.dc* (BUT just make a copy of your $(BDS)lib BEFORE deleting all the *.dc* files)in the $(BDS)lib dir and $(BDS)libdebug dir (do not touch the other files eg. .resource, .res and .nfm files)
2) go to the $(BDS)source dir and run the makefile file with "default" and "debug" options.
So from command prompt in the $(BDS)source dir you run

"make default debug" (without the quotes)

3) delete all old *.dc* in you project dir and re-build.
4) in VCL projects you might still see issues but all you need to do is remove the references to the VCL assemblies in the project pane and then do a re-build of the project.
5) if you still see any compiler error, either remove the offending assembley from the references and do a re-build.

 

More .NET 1.1 SP1 woes.

It seems that there are more reports coming in regarding SP1 for .NET 1.1.  For now, I would recommend holding off any deployments for SP1 on development systems.  There are several “shotgun” approaches to fixing this issue, but until we have a better understanding what the exact problem is, I cannot recommend these approaches just yet.