Talk about Technologies, Software Architecture and Management

Steve Trefethen to leave CodeGear

Steve Trefethen decided to leave CodeGear to pursue a new opportunity. http://www.stevetrefethen.com/blog/AnOpportunity.aspx Some could consider this as bad news but reality is that we are all people with our own ways in life. So let’s congratulate Steve and wish him Best wishes. Thank you for all great things you have done for Delphi (and not only) community. PS. Waiting eagerly for 28th to see where you have chosen to go. Link is sloooooow at this time. I would like to see blog-site visitor stats at this moment. PS. And there is no info about Steve on CodeGear web-site anymore. Something is not right… Blog is clean (http://blogs.codegear.com/stevet/)

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

Map your visitors

How do you track your visitors? There are different ways, but I have found a very nice service available to track where your visitors are coming from. Check little map on the left and you can see where our visitors are located – service provided by http://www.clustrmaps.com/. It is free, it is very easy to use and understand.

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

Delphi and VCL 2.0 or going into XXI century – part 2

Should we dump VCL completly? I do not think so. You step back from VCL. Look at it. Abstract core level from any MS, Qt, VisualCLX, etc stuff. See what is needed to have rich visual and runtime functionality. Base classes. this will give you core – visual abstraction and runtime abstraction. with no platform/vendor specific stuff. Then open this core up to build on it and down to plug into it. Then you come back. You rebuild/adopt VCL classes based on the core keeping VCL public areas intact where possible but not limit yourself by it. Working on DfPHP shown that it is possible to mimic VCL even in such languages as PHP/JS – yes, you might get limited Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

Delphi and VCL 2.0 or going into XXI century

There is no .Net in the new Delphi roadmap you say. And this is not true. HL is a .Net release. and there is more to it…

There is my take on this: Why should we care so much about “platform” layer? Why are we forcing CG to care so much about platform layer?

Nowadays environment is no longer “pure” such as – only Win32, or only .Net. There is mix of old and new applications.

Approach taken with BDS and early VS was great – one can develop both Win32 and .Net.

Now with CG being between two (three) fires and being burned from both sides, it is tough for them to please both with approach taken – by using “pure” adoption of both platforms.

I strongly agree with some, we need VCL 2, aka redesigned and abstracted from OS level and having adapter layer for each platform (if and where it is needed). I love idea of having one IDE and one language for all platforms – VCL->.Net->Win/Mono or VCL->Win32/Win64 or VCL->Mac.

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By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

Delphi Roadmap – see it yourself

Long due Delphi roadmap is out – http://dn.codegear.com/article/36620 7 months of being on its own, CodeGear has presented new and updated Delphi Roadmap describing company’s vision for evolution of Delphi product line. Covering 3 years, roadmap shows where Delphi will be headed in the future.  Highlander was “scaled down” after release of Spacely and now primarily addressing growing lag in .Net support  Few new names appeared – Tiburn aka Delphi 2008 and Barracuda aka CBuilder 2008 – lets use year association for now. Main thing here is long awaited Unicode support and improved VCL.  CodeGear team recently has asked to highlight areas in VCL which require improvements. Oh, well… I can name a few: Grid based controls, update rest of Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

Did you ever consider that prison is better then work?

IN PRISON: You spend the majority of your time in a 10X10 cell. AT WORK: You spend the majority of your time in an 8X8 cubicle. IN PRISON: You get three meals a day. AT WORK: You get a break for one meal and you have to pay for it. IN PRISON: You get time off for good behavior. AT WORK: You get more work for good behavior. IN PRISON: The guard locks and unlocks all the doors for you. AT WORK: You must often carry a security card and open all the doors for yourself. IN PRISON: You can watch TV and play games. AT WORK: You could get fired for watching TV and playing games. IN PRISON: You Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago