In with the good air... out with the bad... In with the good code... out with the bad code... Since we've announced Borland Delphi 2005, I suppose getting it finalized and out the door would be a good thing. We're current erradicating as many creepy-crawlers as we can, and as quickly as we can.
On another note, I'll be in Toronto at the end of November, the 29th and 30th. I'll be speaking at the Falafel Developers Conference.
Yep.. at around 10:15 am PDT, a 6.0 tembler hit about 150 miles south of where I am. It was certainly a rockin' and a rollin'. You can see more information here. This is an automatically updated page so you'll need to hit it soon because the information will probably be cleared soon.
Michael Swindell just posted to BDN, this article regarding the NDA license that was shipped with the BorCon preview. So for all you folks out there remaining tight-lipped about the content of your copy of the Diamondback preview, the floodgates are now open. Sorry for the confusion, folks. You can now post blog entries, articles, newsgroup messages, screenshots, whatever. The preview was a whirl-wind last minute thing, so there was bound to be a few mistakes. Just remember that this is a pre-release copy of Diamongback, so expect things to change considerably between the preview and the final public release.
Looks like TOndrej has snagged a posting I made from the borland.public.delphi.non-technical newsgroup and made a blog entry about it. I honestly thought that the “-r” command-line switch was actually documented. Maybe Delphi 8?
Danny has posted some information on our analysis of the problems that folks are having with the .NET 1.1 SP1 update that was just released a few weeks ago. Now before you get your knickers in knot, we will at least release an interim patch to get folks back on track. However it will take some time for us to fully regress any changes before releasing an “official” update. The problem is, as Danny stated, we simply don't know at this point what the correct fix should be. The worst thing we could do at this point is to bow to all that borland.public.delphi.non-technical pressure and rush a fix out the door. We need to step back, take a deep breath, and attack the problem calmly. We certainly don't want to make the situation worse. I recommend to all those folks that seem to be using this as an excuse to break out the flame-throwers, to take that same tactic. Slow down and take a deep breath. There is truth in the old adage, “haste makes waste.”
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).
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
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!
