Embarcadero has released RAD Studio XE4, its suite of development tools for Window, Web and for the first time, Apple iOS. iOS support first appeared in an earlier release, but in preview, and the current effort works using a new LLVM-based ARM compiler so is somewhat unlike the preview. Individual products such as Delphi XE4

...continue reading RAD Studio XE4 with Delphi for iOS is here. Who will use it?

Delphi developers should note changes in the Delphi language coming as a result of the move towards the LLVM compiler for mobile support. Embarcadero has released a paper describing these in detail. The just-released RAD Studio XE4 includes the ARM compiler for iOS, with an Android compiler to follow later this year.

It seems to

...continue reading Changes in the Delphi language for ARM and mobile support

Embarcadero is removing Prism from the next version of RAD Studio, XE4, expected later this month.

Prism is actually a third-party product, based on RemObjects Oxygene. Prism and Oxygene let you code in Delphi and compile to .NET or Mono.

Marc Hoffman from RemObjects explains the change here:

Starting with the upcoming release of

...continue reading No more Delphi for .NET: Prism removed from RAD Studio XE4

Wondering whether to invest in native apps or HTML5 web apps (maybe wrapped as native) for your next mobile development project? Welcome to plenty of confusion about which is the best path to take. Here are a few pieces of evidence from this month:

A Compuware survey of 3,500 consumers showed a preference for mobile

...continue reading Native apps vs HTML 5: no consensus over how to choose

Now we know why Microsoft has been so reluctant to divulge details of how to deploy a business app that uses the Windows Runtime (also known as Metro apps or Windows Store apps; though in this case the Windows Store app designation is particularly silly since these apps are precisely not Store apps).

Presuming Windows

...continue reading Internal Windows Runtime apps are prohibitively expensive to deploy, says Microsoft Regional Director

Following my piece on different approaches to building the user interface in cross-platform frameworks, twitter user Sam Hogarth pointed me to the PropertyCross project. This implements a non-trivial application in 8 different cross-platform tools, covering Android, iOS and Windows Phone. Note that only four of the frameworks support Windows Phone.

Using the pie charts presented

...continue reading Cross-platform frameworks ordered by percentage of shared code

Embarcadero has acquired the AnyDAC data access libraries from DA-SOFT, including its main author Dmitry Arefiev. These libraries support Delphi and C++ Builder and support connections to a wide range of database servers, including SQL Server, DB2, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Interbase, Firebird, Microsoft Access, and any ODBC connection.

AnyDAC is well liked by Delphi devlopers

...continue reading Embarcadero acquires AnyDAC data access libraries for Delphi, C++ Builder

Microsoft has announced Git integration in both the Visual Studio IDE and the Team Foundation Service hosted source code management system. According to Technical Fellow Brian Harry:

1. Team Foundation Server will host Git repositories – and more concretely, Team Foundation Service has support for hosting Git repositories starting today.

2. Visual Studio will

...continue reading Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server get Git integration

CAST has released an intriguing report on Java applications and software quality.

The company analysed 497 applications, comprising 152 million lines of code across 88 organisations and six global industries. It then looked at how software quality correlated with frameworks used.

◾Hibernate has the highest quality scores. ◾Applications built with Struts have the lowest quality

...continue reading Java software quality: frameworks good, Struts or C++ bad says report

The BBC released a new sports app last week. In the comments to the announcement though, there is little attention given to the app or its content. Rather, the discussion is about why the BBC has apparently prioritised iOS over Android, since the Android version is not yet ready, with an occasional interjection from a

...continue reading The cross-platform app problem. What should the BBC do?

A security issue has been discovered in Ruby on Rails, a popular web application framework. It is a serious one:

There are multiple weaknesses in the parameter parsing code for Ruby on Rails which allows attackers to bypass authentication systems, inject arbitrary SQL, inject and execute arbitrary code, or perform a DoS attack on a

...continue reading Got a Ruby on Rails application running? Patch it NOW

I have been writing about Embarcadero’s RAD Studio XE3, which includes Delphi and C++ Builder, and as part of the research I set this up for cross-platform development on a Mac.

My setup uses a Parallels Virtual Machine to run Windows 7, on which RAD Studio XE3 is installed. This is convenient for Mac

...continue reading Hands on Cross-Platform Windows and Mac development with C++ Builder XE3

Embarcadero has released C++ Builder XE3, the first version built on the open source clang front end for the LLVM compiler. This has enabled the product to support many new features, including extensive C++ 11 support and a 64-bit compiler.

While it is a shame that the old Borland C/C++ Compiler is no more,

...continue reading Embarcadero launches C++ Builder XE3: first built on Clang

Adobe is reminding developers that Flash is still around as a game development platform, with the release of a Game Developer Tools package including a Gaming SDK, the Flash C++ Compiler which translates C++ to ActionScript, Flash Professional CS6 and Flash Builder 4.7.

The new thing here is the Scout profiler, previewed as Monocle, which

...continue reading Adobe launches Game Developer Tools including Scout profiler

I spoke to Dean Guida, CEO at Infragistics, maker of components for Windows, web and mobile development platforms. Windows developers with long memories will remember Sheridan software, who created products including Data Widgets and VBAssist. Infragistics was formed in 2000 when Sheridan merged with another company, ProtoView.

In other words, this is a company

...continue reading Infragistics building cross-platform development strategy on XAML says CEO

Microsoft has released Update 1 for Visual Studio 2012. New in this update is the ability to target Windows XP with C++ applications. Brian Harry has a list of what has changed here, based on the preview from a month ago.

There are many updates and fixes for Team Foundation Server (TFS), including

...continue reading Visual Studio 2012 gets Windows XP targeting, Team Foundation Server fixes

I attended an online seminar by Nokia’s Jure Sustersic on Windows Phone 8 development. It was a high level session so not much new, though Sustersic says the 7.8 update for existing 7.x Windows Phones  is coming very soon; he would not announce a date though.

The slide that caught my eye was one on

...continue reading Apps sell better with Live Tiles, says Nokia, with other tips for phone developers

Adobe Game Developer Evangelist Lee Brimelow has stated on Twitter that AIR for Metro is coming next year.

we’re working on Air for Metro. It should be available first half of next year.

AIR is a way of compiling Flash applications to run outside the browser.

[Microsoft no longer uses the term Metro. We

...continue reading Adobe AIR for Metro promised for first half of 2013

No time to blog in detail about this; but developers with any interest in Windows 8 should check out Project Austin, a sample project for Windows 8 whose quality exceeds most of what is currently available in the Windows Store.

This is a simple note-taking app but beautifully rendered and with support for adding photos,

...continue reading Microsoft Project Austin: superb C++ code sample for Windows 8

I interviewed Corporate VP of Microsoft’s developer division Soma Somasegar at the Visual Studio 2012 launch last week; see the article on the Register here. I asked about the inconsistency of the Microsoft platform, and the way the platform story has changed over the years (Win32, .NET, WPF, Silverlight and now Windows Runtime). Can developers

...continue reading Platform churn? If it is in Windows 8, we are committed to it says Microsoft

Adobe has released its quarterly figures for its third financial quarter 2012. The figures show the success of Creative Cloud, Adobe’s subscription-based model for purchasing the Creative Suite applications, including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat and Flash. Total revenue is fractionally up on the same period in 2011, from $1013.2M to $1080.6M.

Adobe reports over 200,000

...continue reading Adobe results: 200,000 Creative Cloud subscribers and an impressive transition

Microsoft is holding a launch event in Seattle for Visual Studio 2012, attended by selected Microsoft-platform developers as well as press from around the world.

Corporate VP Soma Somasegar kicked off the keynote, saying that Visual Studio 2012 has already been downloaded 600,000 times since its release to the web around one month ago

...continue reading Visual Studio 2012 launch: focus on Modern Apps

One of the disappointments in Microsoft’s new Windows Runtime platform is lack of support for XNA, a gaming/fast graphics API which wraps DirectX and is supported on Windows, Windows Phone and on Xbox 360.

Developer Alexandre Mutel has stepped up to fill the gap with the open source SharpDX, which also provides access to

...continue reading SharpDX: Managed DirectX for Metro from the community

Windows component vendor Telerik has acquired Fiddler, a free tool for inspecting and modifying web traffic, usually used to test and debug network and application issues. The announcement states that Fiddler’s creator Eric Lawrence, currently at Microsoft, is joining Telerik’s testing division.

The story seems to be that Fiddler was a spare time activity

...continue reading Telerik acquires Fiddler

Embarcadero has released RAD Studio XE3, a major upgrade to its suite of tools for Windows, cross-platform and web development.

New in this version:

Windows 8 compatibility Metropolis framework for desktop apps that have the look and feel of Windows 8 “Modern UI” (formerly Metro) apps. Live Tile support is included via a proxy Windows

...continue reading Embarcadero releases RAD Studio XE3

There is a bit of a stir in the Embarcadero community following the leaking of a document which appears to be an email to partners concerning a major change in the EULA (End User Licence Agreement) for the Professional edition of Delphi, the RAD development tool for Windows (with lately some cross-platform capability).

This email

...continue reading Delphi XE3 Professional downgraded to local databases only

Embarcadero RAD Studio XE can help traditional Delphi developers acquire .NET capability. It also provides a means by which .NET developers can extend their applications to non-Windows platforms. Here are a few links to point you in the right direction should you wish to explore the enabling technologies in more depth. These include Prism (a Delphi-like IDE for .NET), a cross platform framework called FireMonkey and some third party tools from RemObjects.

A new version of SQLite is in preparation. If you are not a developer, you might not have heard of SQLite, but you have almost certainly used it. It is built into Mac OS X and numerous web browsers, used by many applications which run on Adobe’s Flash runtime, and is the obvious choice if you want a small, fast and reliable database engine to embed into an application. It is open source and as free as you can get:

Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute the original SQLite code, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means.

SQLite3 is the current version; but now there is an update to version 4:

SQLite4 is an alternative, not a replacement, for SQLite3. SQLite3 is not going away. SQLite3 and SQLite4 will be supported in parallel. The SQLite3 legacy will not be abandoned. SQLite3 will continue to be maintained and improved. But designers of new systems will now have the option...

Embarcadero RAD Studio XE 2.0 enables Visual Studio .NET and Delphi developers to extend their reach across multiple-platforms. It can also help traditional Delphi Win32 developers to acquire .NET capability.

I attended the London BlackBerry Jam, one of around 500 developers (the event was sold out) who showed up to learn about developing for Blackberry 10 and in the hope of snagging a prototype of RIM’s next smartphone, the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha. The event is part of a tour of 26 cities worldwide. I also spoke to Vivek Bhardwaj, Head of Software Portfolio EMEA for RIM. Does BlackBerry 10 have what it takes to  compete against Apple iPhone and Google Android?

A few quick observations. The event was split into native and web tracks, with the native track focusing on  C/C++ development and the Cascades UI framework, and the web track covering WebWorks, the HTML 5 developer tools which you can use to target mobiles as far back as BlackBerry 5, or to create apps that share code between BlackBerry and other mobile platforms.

There was also a tour of various mobile JavaScript libraries. One that caught my attention was Zepto.js, which implements most of the jQuery API in just 8.4k of compressed code,...

Many developers prefer to code against dark backgrounds, according to this post by Monty Hammontree, Director of User Experience in Microsoft’s developer tools division.

Many of you have expressed a preference for coding within a dark editor. For example, dark editor themes dominate the list of all-time favorites at web sites such as http://studiostyl.es/ which serve as a repository for different Visual Studio styles.

Chief among the reasons many of you have expressed for preferring dark backgrounds is the reduced strain placed on the eyes when staring at the screen for many hours. Many developers state that light text on a dark background is easier to read over longer periods of time than dark text on a light background.



Personally...

Adobe has announced that from August 1 2012, developers who make use of hardware-accelerated Stage3D in Flash Player, in combination with Domain Memory, will pay a 9% net revenue share as royalty. Net revenue is what remains after taxes, payment processing fees and “social network platform fees” (sounds like Facebook) are deducted.

“Domain Memory” is a block of memory declared as a byte array that is used as memory by the Alchemy C/C++ to ActionScript compiler. Allocating some bytes from this byte array is much faster than asking the Flash Player to grab some real memory from the system for your new object or variable, and manipulating memory via this technique is quicker too. In other words, it is a hack to improve performance.

Adobe is aiming the new licensing arrangement at games developers. Most developers will not be affected because of the following:

A license is only needed if both Stage3D hardware acceleration and Domain Memory are used. Use just one of these and you are fine. If...

QCon London has just started in London, and I’m interested to see that it is both bigger than last year and also sold out. I should not be surprised, because it is usually the best conference I attend all year, being vendor-neutral (though with an Agile bias), wide-ranging and always thought-provoking.



A few more observations. One reason I attend is to watch industry trends, which are meaningful here because the agenda is driven by what currently concerns developers and software architects. Interesting then to see an entire track on cross-platform mobile, though one that is largely focused on HTML 5....

Embarcadero has announced 54% growth in sales of Delphi and C++ Builder, its rapid application development tools, in 2011 vs 2010. These tools primarily target Windows, but in the 2011 XE2 edition also support Mac and iOS applications. XE2 also added a 64-bit compiler, making this the most significant Delphi release for years. The company says that the 2011 figures come on top of 15% year on year growth in the previous three years.

This is encouraging for Delphi developers, and well deserved in that Delphi still offers the most productive environment for native code development on Windows. The cross platform aspect is also interesting, though the FireMonkey framework which enables it is less mature than the old VCL, and there are many other options out there for cross-platform apps. FireMonkey does not yet support Android or other mobile platforms apart from Apple iOS.

2012 is also the year of Windows 8, raising the question of whether Delphi and C++ Builder will support the new Windows Runtime...

NVIDIA has released version 4.1 of its CUDA Toolkit for general purpose GPU computing.



There is a lot in this release, including a compiler based on LLVM, which will make it easier to support other programming languages; 1000 new imaging functions; and a re-designed visual profiler.

There is also an update to Parallel Nsight, for debugging and profiling CUDA applications in Visual Studio. This is free, though you have to register as an NVIDIA developer. You need this update to work with the 4.1 toolkit.

You do have to update your graphics card driver:



using...

Zend, a company which specialises in PHP frameworks and tools, has released the results of a developer survey from November 2011.

The survey attracted 3,335 respondents drawn, it says, from “enterprise, SMB and independent developers worldwide.” I have a quibble with this, since I believe the survey should state that these were PHP developers. Why? Because I have an email from November which asked me to participate and said:

Zend is taking the pulse of PHP developers. What’s hot and what matters most in your view of PHP?

There is a difference between “developers” and “PHP developers”, and much though I love PHP the survey should make this clear. Nevertheless, If you participated, but mainly use Java or some other language, your input is still included. Later the survey states that “more than 50% of enterprise developers and more than 65% of SMB developers surveyed report spending more than half of their time working in PHP.” But if they are already identified as PHP developers, that...

Adobe released its quarterly and full year results last week; I am catching up with this now after a week in China.

The company is doing well. Revenue is up by 11% year on year and it generated $1.5 billion in cash. It is buying back shares, usually a sign that a company has more money than it knows what to do with.

Here is the comparison with the equivalent quarter last year:

  Q4 2010 Q4 2011 Creative and interactive 404.8 437.2 Digital Media 165.9 186.4 Digital Enterprise 273.3 342.4 Omniture 109.0 131.1 Print and publishing 55 55.1 In other words, all business segments grew – impressive in uncertain economic times. See this earlier post for a rough breakdown of the segments.

A couple of observations. First, Adobe is benefiting from the big trend in IT towards web, cloud and device. Many companies regard apps (as in mobile apps) as vehicles for marketing, and Adobe’s tools are a natural fit, with or without Flash. We are in a more design-centric IT world than...

Patent blogger Florian Mueller quotes a statement filed by Oracle in its legal dispute with Google over its use of the Java language in Android:

Android’s growth in the mobile device market has been exponential, steadily diminishing Java’s share. For instance, Amazon’s newly-released Kindle Fire tablet is based on Android, while prior versions of the Kindle were Java-based. Android has been gaining in other areas as well, with Android-based set-top boxes and even televisions appearing this year. These are markets where Java has traditionally been strong but is now losing ground to Android. The longer Android is allowed to continue fragmenting the Java ecosystem, the more serious the harm to Java becomes, and the more difficult it is to try to unwind. Oracle suffers harm in the form of lost licensing opportunities for its existing Java platform products, and the enterprise-wide harm from fragmentation of Java, which reduces the ‘write once, run anywhere’ capability that has historically provided Java...

Adobe has told a group of Flex developers, invited to San Francisco for a special reconciliatory summit following the sudden announcement that Flex is moving to the Apache Foundation, that Flash Catalyst will be discontinued. Developer Fabien Nicollet was there and posts:

CS5.5 version of Catalyst is the latest version of Flash Catalyst. It is compatible with Flex 4.5, but compatibility will not be ensured for future versions.

Flash Builder will also have features removed in future versions. Adobe’s slide talks of:

Removing unpopular and expensive to maintain features: Design View, Data Centric Development (DCD) and Flash Catalyst workflows.

The Monocle profiler, shown at the MAX conference as a sneak peek, “continues as a priority”.

The FalconJS project, to compile Flex to HTML5, will be discontinued, though possibly donated to Apache at a date to be determined.

AIR on Linux will not be given to Apache because it would mean sharing the proprietary Flash Player...

I’m in Beijing for NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference; I attended last year’s event in San Jose and found it fascinating, partly because it has an academic and research flavour with a huge variety of projects on display.

This year the event is in Beijing, reflecting the level of HPC (High Performance Computing) activity in this region.





NVIDIA’s...

RemObjects has released Oxygene for Java, a new version of its Object Pascal compiler. Object Pascal is pretty much the Delphi language though with some additional features of its own. Previous versions target the .NET runtime, and a version of this is marketed by Embarcadero as Prism. The IDE for Oxygene is Microsoft’s Visual Studio. This new version targets both the Java Runtime and the Android Dalvik VM. The obvious target market is Delphi developers who now want to create apps for Android, or cross-platform Java applications.

I downloaded the trial and ran the supplied Hello World in the Android emulator … it works.



A...

The Sencha blog has a great series of posts on HTML5 support on various devices. This is of direct interest to Sencha because its products are JavaScript and CSS application frameworks, Sencha Touch for mobile and ExtJS for any browser. The latest post is on the Amazon Kindle Fire – and it is weak:

The Amazon Kindle Fire doesn’t seem designed to run HTML5 apps as a primary goal. It does a good job of displaying ordinary web pages and its resolution and rendering capabilities meet that need well. But there are too many sharp edges, performance issues, and missing HTML5 features for us to recommend that any developer create web apps primarily for the Kindle Fire. The iPad 2 running iOS 5 continues to be the tablet to beat, with the PlayBook a respectable runner-up in HTML5 capabilities.

Part of the problem is that the Fire runs Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread) which has a weaker browser than later versions. That is not the only source of disappointment though. According to Sencha’s Michael Mullany,...

Someone asked me what is the best programming language for a child to learn after starting (and having success) with Scratch.

Scratch is a visual programming language which actually runs on Smalltalk, though its users do not need to know this. Scratch 2.0 seems to be written in Adobe Flash so you can create and program projects in a web browser. As far as I can tell though, there is no obvious and natural progression from Scratch to a code-centric programming language.

I guess the first answer is not to move away from Scratch until you need to. You can do a lot with Scratch, as the many shared projects demonstrate.

Still, I agree that it makes sense to learn text-based programming before too long. What is the best one for a child to learn, not necessarily with computer science or a professional career in mind, but just to take the next step and create some cool games and applications?

I find myself leaning towards Microsoft’s C#. The reason is that there is a capable free...

Adobe has issued further information about its intention to donate the Flex SDK, which builds Flash applications from XML and ActionScript, to the Apache Software Foundation. Specifically, the donation will include:

BlazeDS, the free version of LiveCycle Data Services Falcon, the new Flex compiler due to be completed in 2012 Falcon JS, a previously unannounced project Of these, Falcon JS is the most eye-catching. This is an “experimental cross-compiler from MXML and ActionScript to HTML and JavaScript.” In other words, Falcon JS has the potential to give developers a migration path from Flash to HTML clients. Note that it is described as a cross-compiler rather than a porting tool, so it may well be that the output is not easily edited. The Google Web Toolkit works like this, converting Java to JavaScript but not in a form that anyone is expected to edit. Adobe also adds:

We have undertaken some experimental work in this area, but remain unsure as to the viability of fully translating Flex-based...

Supercomputing and low-power computing are not normally associated; but at the SC11 Supercomputing conference the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) has announced a new supercomputer, called the called the Mont-Blanc Project, which will combine the ARM-based NVIDIA Tegra SoC with separate CUDA GPUs. CUDA is NVIDIA’s parallel computing architecture, enabling general purpose computing on the GPU.

The project’s publicity says this enables power saving of 15 to 30 times, versus today’s supercomputers:

The analysis of the performance of HPC systems since 1993 shows exponential improvements at the rate of one order of magnitude every 3 years: One petaflops was achieved in 2008, one exaflops is expected in 2020. Based on a 20 MW power budget, this requires an efficiency of 50 GFLOPS/Watt. However, the current leader in energy efficiency achieves only 1.7n GFLOPS/Watt. Thus, a 30x improvement is required.

NVIDIA is also creating a new hardware and software development kit for Tegra + CUDA, to...

One thing that is easy to overlook in all the talk about Windows Phone, Nokia, and Microsoft’s prospects against iPhone and Android, is that the Windows Phone developer platform has substantially improved with the 7.1 SDK – the phone is 7.5 but the SDK is 7.1, just to confuse you.

Here are a few highlights from the list of what’s new:

Multitasking. Apps still do not continue to run when they do not have the focus. However, Microsoft has implemented several features to make it look as if they do. This includes background agents, background audio (another kind of agent), scheduled tasks, background file transfers, and fast application switching. Although apps do not execute in the background, they do stay in memory if free space allows, so that resume is near-instant.

Silverlight 4. The version of Silverlight implemented in Windows Phone is now Silverlight 4, though there are some differences between Silverlight on the desktop and Silverlight on the phone, including the fact that there...

Adobe has announced a shift in its business strategy, together with the loss of around 750 employees.

So what is changing? Adobe says it will be focusing on digital media and digital marketing, while investing less in “certain enterprise solution product lines.” In line with this strategy, Adobe acquired video advertising company auditude last week.

Here are the things which Adobe says are “important elements” in its new approach:

Creative Suite extended with tablet apps and delivered through the cloud Greater investment in HTML 5: Dreamweaver, Edge and PhoneGap Flash positioned for “advanced” web, video, and mobile apps Digital publishing solutions Video advertising Document services such as electronic contracts and signatures So what will Adobe be doing less? This is harder to discern as the releases, naturally enough, say less about it. The key remark is that:

the company will reduce its investment, and expected license revenue, in certain enterprise solution product...

Last weekend there was some publicity around Xtend, an Eclipse project which extends Java with new language features. Xtend now has a new landing page, as announced by the lead architect Sven Efftinge.

I did intend to post about this yesterday, but I wanted to see it in action first, so I tried to download it and have a look. I believe this is a case where those who wrote the new landing page are too close to the project and made some assumptions, because I did not find it obvious how to proceed.

If you follow the Download link you are invited to paste one of the three URLs into the Eclipse update manager.



As...

I have been trying out JetBrains’ AppCode which meant working in an Apple development environment for a time. I took the opportunity to implement my simple calculator app in iOS native code.



Objective C is a distinctive language with a mixed reputation, but I enjoy coding with it. I used Automatic Reference Counting (ARC), a feature introduced in Xcode 4.2 and OSX 10.7, iOS 5; ARC now also works with 10.6 and iOS 4. This means objects are automatically disposed, and I did not have to worry about memory management at all in my simple app. This is not a complete memory management solution (if there is such a thing) –...

Google has announced an early preview of Dart, a new language for web applications. The news is not a surprise, especially if you have been keeping track of the developer conference GOTO Aarhus, whose organisers had pre-announced that Google would be announcing its new language there, as indeed it did.



Dart is a curly-brace language like JavaScript, Java, C, C++ and C#. In Dart, as in C# and Java, a class can implement multiple interfaces, but only inherit from a single class. Dart supports both static and dynamic typing. Google says it can be executed by a Dart VM, or converted to JavaScript:

Dart...

Embarcadero’s CodeRage virtual conference starts next week from October 17 2011, and is worth a look if you have any interest in Delphi or the new RAD Studio XE2.

There are sessions on 64-bit Delphi, the new cross-platform FireMonkey framwork, the new LiveBindings data binding system, Prism (Delphi for .NET), and extras including a session on Regular Expressions in Delphi and elsewhere, Dependency Injection and Delphi Spring, unit testing with Delphi, and using 3D graphics in business applications.

Of course you could wait for the replays to be available, but if this is like previous events there is a chance to ask questions to people who might actually know the answers, so there is an advantage to the live event – though the event is schedules for Pacific Time so the afternoon ones involve a late night if you are in the UK.

Related posts:Updated SQLite wrapper for Embarcadero Delphi (and Free Pascal) What’s coming in Delphi RAD Studio XE2: more details of 64-bit and Mac announced,...

I have installed the Windows 8 developer preview on Oracle VirtualBox. It does not work on Virtual PC since 64-bit guests are not supported. It is probably fine on Hyper-V, but I don’t have spare Hyper-V capacity for it at the moment.



I had a few hassles and thought it would be worth sharing my notes.

I gave the VM 2GB of RAM, 2 processors, and the maximum amount of video ram, but these settings are up to you.

The main problem I encountered was with the mouse. I found that it worked a bit in the Windows 8 guest, but only a bit. The pointer jumped around and was too...

I am reading the excellent book Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley. But what is Continuous Delivery and how does it differ from the other “continuous” development methodologies?

It helps to understand that all these methodologies spring from the Agile software development movement, and the expression Continuous Delivery is a quote from the Agile Manifesto:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Now, the starting assumption is that most software projects integrate a number of smaller projects, whether from third-parties or from team members. Since these pieces are developed to some extent independently there is a risk that changes made to one piece will require modifications to another piece; hence according to Humble and Farley:

Most software developed by large teams spends a significant proportion of its development time in an unusable state.

The business of getting all the parts to work...

Developers are predicted to have a busy time ahead, despite the introduction of Visual Studio LightSwitch that has the potential to reduce coding effort.

Last week Google integrated Native Client into the beta of Chrome 14. Native client lets you compile C/C++ code to run in the browser. It depends on a new plug-in API called Pepper. These are open source projects sponsored by Google and implemented in the Chrome browser, and therefore also likely to turn up in Chrome OS which is an operating system in which all apps run in the browser.

Native Client is cool. For example, NaCLBox lets you run old DOS games in the browser by porting DOSBox to Native Client.



Another project is Qt for Google Native Client, a project currently in development....

I am doing some work on a Mac at the moment. On Windows I store passwords in PasswordSafe, an open source utility that works well, so I wondered if I could access my PasswordSafe database from the Mac.



I could have run the Windows version in Parallels, which I have just installed, but I figured a Mac version would be more convenient. I didn’t see a Mac build among the downloads, but PasswordSafe is cross-platform, so I downloaded the source to do a quick compile.

I was glad to find README.MAC.DEVELOPERS.txt in the PasswordSafe source and set to work. The first task is to download wxWidgets, a cross-platform...

Embarcardero is drip-feeding information about its forthcoming RAD Studio XE2 in an annoying manner; nevertheless the product does look interesting and promises cross-platform native code apps for Windows 64-bit, Windows 32-bit, Mac OS X and Apple iOS. I have grabbed some screens from a video recently posted by Embarcadero’s Andreano Lanusse; the video is also embedded below.

Here is Delphi XE2 showing a FireMonkey application in the designer. FireMonkey is a new cross-platform GUI framework.



Note the list of target platforms on the right. If you squint you can see 64-bit Windows, OSX, and...

I’ve just spotted that PhoneGap has reached version 1.0. The release was announced at PhoneGap day in Portland, on Friday 29th July.

I have spent some time trying out various cross-platform mobile development tools. PhoneGap is among the most interesting and popular, and is also open source and free to use. If you believe that using the browser engine as an application runtime is the most sensible route to cross-platform mobile applications, then PhoneGap is the leading contender. It wraps your application to look like a native app, and also provides ways to call the native API when necessary.

PhoneGap received a boost when Adobe built it into Dreamweaver 5.5. I tried it out and was impressed with the design environment, but I am not sure how serious Adobe is about PhoneGap since there is no documentation on how to package your PhoneGap app for release, and my post has comments from puzzled users. My solution was to export the project to Eclipse and the standard PhoneGap tools, which misses...

Vision Mobile has published a report on what it calls the Open Governance Index. The theory is that if you want to measure the extent to which an open source project is really open, you should look at its governance, rather than focusing on the license under which code is released:

The governance model used by an open source project encapsulates all the hard questions about a project. Who decides on the project roadmap? How transparent are the decision-making processes? Can anyone follow the discussions and meetings taking place in the community? Can anyone create derivatives based on the project? What compliance requirements are there for creating derivative handsets or applications, and how are these requirements enforced? Governance determines who has influence and control over the project or platform – beyond what is legally required in the open source license.

The 45-page report is free to download, and part-funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Program. It is a good read, covering...

Microsoft has released Visual Studio LightSwitch, a rapid application builder for data-centric applications.



LightSwitch builds Silverlight applications, which may seem strange bearing in mind that the future of Silverlight has been hotly debated since its lack of emphasis at the 2010 Professional Developers Conference. The explanation is either that Silverlight – or some close variant of Silverlight – has a more important future role than has yet been revealed; or that the developer division invented LightSwitch before Microsoft’s strategy shifted.

Either way, note that LightSwitch is a model-driven tool that is...

Adobe is giving up its efforts to support developers deploying to multiple app stores. The idea of InMarket,  announced at the Adobe MAX Conference in October 2010, was to be a one-stop distribution point for developers seeking to target multiple platforms. Adobe handled distribution and billing. The reason given:

Yesterday, SUSE and Xamarin announced, in effect, the transfer of all things Mono to Xamarin.

The agreement grants Xamarin a broad, perpetual license to all intellectual property covering Mono, MonoTouch, Mono for Android and Mono Tools for Visual Studio. Xamarin will also provide technical support to SUSE customers using Mono-based products, and assume stewardship of the Mono open source community project.

Xamarin is a startup formed by Mono founder Miguel de Icaza following the acquisition of Novell and SUSE by Attachmate, which ceased Mono development.

Attachmate acquired Novell in November 2010. Mono has been plucked from the abyss with impressive speed.

That said, the strategy behind Mono has shifted. Mono exists because de Icaza liked what Microsoft announced back in 2000 when it introduced C# and the .NET Framework. Microsoft made a show of standardizing the .NET CLI (Common Language Infrastructure), which made PR sense at the time since there was controversy over Sun’s...

Adobe has released a beta version of Flash Player 11 and AIR 3. The AIR release is of limited interest since as yet there is no public SDK; Adobe mainly wants to test compatibility.  That said, the announcement describes a key new feature, the ability to package AIR applications as standalone executables on Windows, Mac and Android. You can already do this on Apple iOS, a feature that was forced on Adobe by Apple’s refusal to allow application runtimes on iOS – unless they are WebKit or FileMaker. This is new for the other platforms though, and I assume comes as a result of the popularity of the iOS packager. The effect is that you no longer have to advertise the fact that your app runs on AIR or require users to obtain the runtime; your app will just work.

Adobe may have its eye on the Mac App Store, which will disallow applications that require a runtime. Extending the AIR packager to desktop OS X should get around that limitation.

64-bit Flash Player is also a big deal, and really...

Flash 4.5.1 has been released recently, the first with integrated support for Apple iOS as well as Google Android and RIM Blackberry Tablet OS. I was keen to try my calculator app on iOS, having already tested it for Android. You can do most of the development on Windows, but I moved the project to OS X so I could try it in the iOS simulator and then on an actual iPhone 4.

Adding iOS as a target platform was easy: right-click the project, choose Properties, check to add the platform.



Then I worked on the UI. The buttons on my design were too small. The answer I guess is to use relative sizes, but I thought for a...

Adobe has announced its financial results for its second quarter. Revenue is up 9% year on year, and profits are up too, so it looks like a strong quarter. However, the success is really limited to a couple of business segments.

Here is the comparison with the equivalent quarter last year:

  Q2 2010 Q2 2011 Creative and interactive 429.3 433.1 Digital Media 139.3 136.7 Digital Enterprise 231.9 283.5 Omniture 91.9 115.9 Print and publishing 56.6 54 Adobe has changed the segmentation of these figures since last time I looked, removing the confusing Platform and splitting out Digital Media. Broadly:

Creative and interactive is most of Creative Suite and the Flash platform including both developer tools and streaming servers. It also includes the nascent Digital Publishing Suite for  Apple iPad and tablet publications. Digital Media is Creative Suite Production Premium and individual sales of Photoshop. Premiere Pro, After Effects and Audition. Digital Enterprise Solutions...

A detailed benchmark posted on codeproject investigates the performance of basic operations including string handling, hash tables, math generics, simple arithmetic, sorting, file scanning and (for C#) platform invoke of native code. These are the conclusions:

Adobe has announced its Digital Enterprise Platform for Customer Experience Management. My tip to Adobe: that is too many words with too many syllables for busy IT people who are trying to get their work done. What on earth is it? The same old stuff repackaged, or something genuinely new?

Vision Mobile has published its report on mobile development. It is a detailed report and worth reading, though I would be wary about taking it too seriously since some of the results are puzzling. This is what the report is based on:

Microsoft’s Jason Zander has announced that Erich Gamma will be joining the Visual Studio team as a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer. Gamma is one of the “Gang of Four” who shook up software development back in 1994 with the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

I've finally managed to finish reading this great book, Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform. The book takes a use-case based approach to architecting solutions using Microsoft technologies. Real-world business challenges provide examples of how to use the latest technologies from Microsoft and importantly how to choose the right technology for the task at hand, which can be challenging given the number of choices now available.

I attended the London press briefing for Windows Phone “Mango”, also known as Windows Phone 7.1. This will be on new phones in the Autumn, and will be a free update for all existing Windows Phone 7 devices.



Microsoft showed a bunch of new features, including Internet Explorer 9 – which, we were told, is built from the same code as the PC version – improved social media integration now including Twitter and LinkedIn as well as Facebook, Hotmail, Exchange, Messenger and Gmail; and multi-tasking support.

Hold down the back key for a moment, and all running apps appear in a tiled view. Just tap the one...

I spoke to Dean Guida, CEO and co-founder of Infragistics, at TechEd in Atlanta earlier this week. Infragistics makes components, mainly for Windows but now beginning to support non-Windows clients. There is a set of jQuery controls in preparation, and “Our roadmaps are also going to deliver native on Android and iPhone,” Guida told me.

I have been trying several cross-platform development tools for mobile, and today I set out to create an Adobe AIR app for Android using the new Flash Builder 4.5, available separately or as part of the Creative Suite CS5.5.

I made another calculator app, which may seem boring but gives me a chance to compare like with like.

You get started by running up Flash Builder and creating a new Flex Mobile Project.



The disappointment here is that only Android is supported, so it is not all that cross-platform. According to Adobe’s Andrew Shorten:

An update to Flash Builder, scheduled...

Microsoft ‘s Jamin Spitzer has announced toolkits for Apple iOS, Google Android and Windows Phone, to support its Azure cloud computing platform. I downloaded the toolkit for iOS and took a look. It is a start, but it is really only a toolkit for Azure storage, excluding SQL Azure.

RunRev LiveCode is a cross-platform development tool for Mac, Windows, Linux, Web, Apple iOS and, from this month, Google Android.

Web Directions has published a State of Mobile Web Development based on input from around 1300 professional web developers. Note that this is a survey of web developers not app developers, which must skew the results if you are interested in the overall app picture, but it is still interesting.

This is a follow-on from my earlier post about building a simple PhoneGap app using Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5. I built it on Windows targeting Android. I liked the development experience up to the point of trying the app: it looks great, but performance is terrible. That is, you tap a button and there is a perceptible pause before the app responds. It is worse in the emulator than on my HTC Desire, but still poor.

Oracle Database 10g Express is a free edition that can be used for development and deployment.  After a long wait, the Beta release of 11g R2 is now available for download.

I have been trying out Visual Studio LightSwitch, which has an option to deploy apps to Windows Azure. Of course I wanted to try this,  and after a certain amount of hassle generating certificates and switching between Visual Studio LightSwitch and the Azure management portal I succeeded.

Announced at Mobile World Congress last month, BlueVia is Telefonica’s effort to attract developers to its app platform. Telefonica is the largest phone operator in Spain and also owns O2 in the UK, and has various other operations around the world.

Embarcadero has announced the AppWave Store, a forthcoming app store for Windows which uses application virtualization to avoid the hassles and risks of the usual Windows install process.

Microsoft has announced the release candidate of Entity Framework 4.1, the data persistence library for .NET, with a go-live licence. The final release to the web is expected in around one month’s time.

The big new feature is code-first, where you do not need to define a database schema or even a database model. You simply write classes that define objects you want to store, and the framework handles the work of defining the database for you.

There is a certain amount of fuss over the fact that Apple’s latest mobile Safari does not give full performance when either embedded in another application, or pinned to the home screen.

It would help if Apple were more forthcoming on the issue; but in general you cannot assume that embedded browser components will behave the same way as the full browser, even when they share common libraries.

WCF is Windows Communication Foundation, the part of Microsoft’s .NET framework that handles service-oriented architecture. When WCF was first designed Microsoft was betting on SOAP web services. SOAP is still widely used but since then the trend has been towards more web-friendly services based on REST (Representational State Transfer) and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). Microsoft has always argued that WCF is flexible enough to support such alternatives.

That said, a project which I have become aware of here at QCon London is the WCF Web APIs, presented here by Microsoft’s Glenn Block. WCF Web APIs focus on support for REST, JQuery clients, and programming model simplicity for a variety of other clients such as Silverlight and Windows Phone. The bit that surprised me is that WCF Web APIs are not just another wrapper for WCF; it is a completely new library that does not build on the old WCF Service Model. The fact that it is called WCF at all is confusing, though of course it belongs in that...

The Flash/HTML5 debate is nothing new amongst developers and over the past year the for and against argument for each tool has circulated the web causing

DevExpress, which creates add-on components and tools for Windows and Delphi, has posted its 2011 roadmap. This shows more convergence between...

I respect JetBrains, an IDE company which survives despite intense competition from free tools such as Eclipse and NetBeans. It does so because developers like the products, especially the IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE. The tools are focused on coding;

Microsoft has announced an improved introductory trial for Windows Azure. You can now get:

RunRev has announced a preview version of its LiveCode for Google Android, which will join existing versions for Windows, Mac, Linux, Web and iOS.

While researching another product I came across this 2009 tweet from Microsoft’s Nikhil Kothari:

Apple has created a beautiful mobile platform; but it has some drawbacks. One was highlighted yesterday, when Apple rejected an app from Sony for reading and purchasing digital books on the device.

According to Apple’s Trudy Miller, as quoted in the New York Times:

We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app.

What Miller does not spell out is the further implication, which is that the purchase must go though the Apple App Store, and is therefore subject both to approval and to a 30% fee to Apple.

There is a suggestion that Apple is only applying the rule to books at the moment, but that could change. Other readers such as Amazon’s Kindle app will be affected though, after a grace period ending June 30 2011 for existing applications.

Currently these apps have a link which opens the browser, so that users can purchase on the web, and then download...

Embarcadero has announced Starter Editions for both Delphi XE and C++ Builder XE, rapid development environments for native Windows applications.

Oracle has announced the discontinuation of Ruby support in the NetBeans IDE. The reason? First, to free resources for JDK 7 support; but second (and more significant) – hardly anyone was using it.

Visual Studio 2010 was released on April 12th 2010. Nine months on, how good has it proved to be?

Microsoft announced today at CES in Las Vegas that the next version of Windows will run on ARM as well as Intel CPUs. But why? The reason is that ARM CPUs have huge momentum in mobile computing, thanks to their low power consumption.

Microsoft has posted a white paper setting out what you need to do in order to have users who are signed on to a local Windows domain seamlessly use an Azure-hosted application, without having to sign in again.

Microsoft has announced details of Silverlight 5, a major new release of its browser plug-in and desktop runtime for Windows and Mac. Silverlight is also the primary application runtime for Windows Phone 7, though this update does not apply to the phone yet. Silverlight 5 will go into beta in the first half of 2011, and release is planned for the second half of 2011 – no more than a year or so away.

So what’s in Silverlight 5?

On the media side, there is hardware decoding of H.264 video (an overdue feature) plus enhancements including TrickPlay which enables fast-forward and rewind. There is also remote control support of some kind. According to VP Scott Guthrie, you will be able to stream HD video to a netbook.

The bigger area of change is in Silverlight as an application runtime. Here are the highlights:

Text rendering is much improved, with multi-columns, OpenType support, and control of tracking and leading. Postscript vector printing greatly improves printing support, and you can...

I have a PC on which I did most of my work for several years. It runs Windows XP, and although I copied any critical data off it long ago, I still wheel it out from time to time because it has Visual Studio 6 and Delphi 7 projects with various add-ins installed, and it is easier to use the existing PC than to replicate the environment in a virtual machine.

These old machines are a nuisance though; so I thought I’d try migrating it to a virtual machine. There are numerous options for this, but I picked Microsoft Hyper-V because I already run several test servers on this platform with success. Having a VM on a server rather than on the desktop with Virtual PC, Virtual Box or similar means it is always easily available and can be backed up centrally.

The operation began smoothly. I installed the free Sysinternals utility Disk2vhd, which uses shadow copy so that it can create a VHD (virtual hard drive) from the system on which it is running. Next, I moved the VHD to the Hyper-V server and created...

The answer is no, of course. And Canvas is not a plugin. That said, here is an interesting proof of concept blog and video from Alexander Larsson: a GTK3 application running in Firefox without any plugin.

What is happening with the Java language and runtime? Since Java passed into the hands of Oracle, following its acquisition of Sun, there has been a succession of bad news. To recap:

The JavaOne conference in September 2010 was held in the shadow of Oracle OpenWorld making it a less significant event than in previous years. Oracle is suing Google, claiming that Java as used in the Android SDK breaches its copyright. IBM has abandoned the Apache open source Harmony project and is committing to the Oracle-supported Open JDK. Although IBM’s Sutor claims that this move will “help unify open source Java efforts”, it seems to have been done without consultation with Apache and is as much divisive as unifying. Apple is deprecating Java and ceasing to develop a Mac-specific JVM. This should be seen in context. Apple is averse to runtimes of any kind – note its war against Adobe Flash – and seems to look forward to a day when all or most applications delivered to Apple devices come via the Apple-curated...

Apple is scrapping is Xserve products, according to the latest information on its web site:

Last week was all conferences - Adobe MAX 2010 followed by Microsoft PDC - which left me with plenty of input but too little time to write it up. It is not too late though; and one advantage of attending these two events back-to-back was to highlight the tale of two runtimes, Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.

Microsoft’s president of Server and Tools Bob Muglia has posted a response to the widespread perception that the company is backing off its commitment to Silverlight, a cross-browser, cross-platform runtime for rich internet applications.

Evernote has released version 4.0 of its excellent note-taking product. Software developers have taken particular interest in the blog post announcing its release, because of what it says about .NET, in this case the Windows Presentation Foundation, versus native code:

I guess a lot of people know about LINQPad and what a great tool it is for LINQ queries, but it’s definitely worth another mention even if you have heard some already. I’ve been using it recently and want to give an overview of what you can do with this great tool.

Visual Studio corporate VP Jason Zander has announced that IronPython and IronRuby, .NET implementations of popular dynamic languages, are to be handed over to the open source community. This includes add-ons that enable development in Visual Studio, IronPython Tools and IronRuby Tools. Of the two, IronPython is a more mature and usable project.

Apple has deprecated the version of Java that it ports and maintains for OS X:

JetBRAINS has released PyCharm, an IDE for Python and the Django web development framework.

The company is best known for the IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE, and indeed PyCharm is mostly written in Java, but now has other tools for languages including PHP and Ruby and Rails. It also does add-ins for .NET developrs working in Visual Studio.

I spent yesterday in the dim light of a Manchester cinema, attending the Windows Phone 7 developer day.

Microsoft has announced the beta release of NuPack, which is a package manager for .NET projects, mainly focused on open source libraries. NuPack itself is open source.

I’m waiting for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to speak at the London School of Economics, which seems a good moment to reflect on his well-known war cry “Developers Developers Developers”.

Behind the phrase is a theory about how to make your platform succeed. The logic is something like this. Successful platforms have lots of applications, and applications are created by developers. If you make your platform appealing to developers, they will build applications which users will want to run, therefore your platform will win in the market.

Today though we have an interesting case study – Apple’s iPhone. The iPhone has lots of apps and is winning in the market, but not because Apple made it appealing to developers. In fact, Apple put down some roadblocks for developers. The official SDK has one programming language, Objective C, which is not particularly easy to use, and unlikely to be known other than by existing Apple platform developers. Apps can only be distributed through Apple’s store, and you have...

Blackberry has announced its pitch for the emerging tablet market, the 7” screen PlayBook. It has a new OS base on QNX Neutrino, a webkit-based web browser, Adobe Flash and AIR – offline Flash applications – front and rear cameras for video conferencing as well as taking snaps, and includes a USB port and HDMI out.

Exhibiting here at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference is a Cambridge-based company called tidepowerd, whose product GPU.NET brings GPU programming to .NET developers.

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsung Huang spoke to the press at the GPU Technology Conference and I took the opportunity to ask some questions.

I’m at NVIDIA’s GPU tech conference in San Jose. The central theme of the conference is that the capabilities of modern GPUs enable substantial performance gains for general computing, not just for graphics, though most of the examples we have seen involve some element of graphical processing. The reason you should care about this is that the gains are huge.

At the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference in San Jose CEO Jen-Hsun Huang talked up the company’s progress in GPU computing, showed some example applications, and announced a high-level roadmap for future graphics chip architectures. NVIDIA has three areas of focus, he said: the Quadro line for visualisation, Tesla for parallel computing, and GeForce/Tegra for personal computing. Tegra is a system on a chip aimed at mobile devices. Mobile, says Huang, is “a completely disruptive force to all of computing.”

NVIDIA’s current chip architecture is called Fermi. The company is settling on a two-year product cycle and will deliver Kepler in 2011 with 3 to 4 times the performance (expressed as Gigaflops per watt) of Fermi. Maxwell in 2013 will have around 12 times the performance of Fermi. In between these architecture changes, NVIDIA will do “kicker” updates to refresh its products, with one for Fermi due soon.

The focus of the conference though is not on super-fast graphics cards in themselves, but rather...

I’ve just picked up that Delphi XE, the latest RAD Windows development suite from Embarcadero, includes licenses for older versions going back to Delphi 7.

Microsoft is countering rumours that WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) or Silverlight, a cross-platform browser plug-in based on the same XAML markup language and .NET programming combination as WPF, are under any sort of threat from HTML 5.0.

Think Apple’s iPad is a consumer platform? Think again. I’m at the Cloudforce conference in London; and the level of iPad visibility has been striking.

I ran into this issue today and it’s the second time this has burned me. It didn’t take as long to figure out this time, but hopefully typing this up will ingrain it into my brain further.

Microsoft’s Brad Becker, Director of Product Management for Developer Platforms, has defended the role of Silverlight in the HTML 5 era

SapphireSteel Software is poised to release Amethyst, which lets you develop Flash and Flex applications with Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 or 2010.

I had a chat with Jay Schmelzer and  Doug Seven from the Visual Studio LightSwitch team. I asked about the release date – no news yet.

Microsoft has announced a new edition of Visual Studio called LightSwitch, now available in beta, and it is among the most interesting development tools I’ve seen.

A comment here points me to this comparison by Decebal Mihailescu of start-up times for processes on Windows using different runtimes: .NET in several versions, Java 1.6, Mono 2.6.4, and Visual C++ 2010 (native code).

Oracle is suing Google over Java in Android; the Register has a link to the complaint itself which lists seven patents which Oracle claims Google has infringed.

Embarcadero has announced RAD Studio XE and will be showing a number of “sneak peaks” during August prior to release in “early September”. You can see the previews and further information here.

The suite includes Delphi XE, C++Builder XE, Delphi Prism XE (Delphi for Visual Studio and .NET) and RadPHP XE.

The first preview focuses on integrated Subversion support, a nice feature but hardly a game changer – most IDEs have had this for years, though this looks comprehensive with differencing, file history and so on within the IDE.



There’s also a look at RadPHP, which is a new version of Delphi for PHP. It is reminiscent of ASP.NET Web Forms, in that it gives a drag-and-drop visual...

Jimmy Schementi, until recently a Program Manager at Microsoft working on IronRuby, has posted about why he is leaving the company; and in doing so answers a question I posed a few months back, Why F# rather than IronPython in Visual Studio 2010?

Apple’s iPhone is still perceived as primarily marketed to individuals rather than corporates. However, I was interested to see how much Apple is doing to attract corporate developers. First, Apple now supports some basic enterprise-friendly features, such as Microsoft Exchange (with a few caveats), VPN, remote wipe, and the ability to lock down iTunes to some extent. Without these capabilities, the devices would not be acceptable in many environments, making it pointless to consider them for custom applications.

Unfortunately iTunes is still needed for activation, deploying software updates, and installing applications. It is silly that Apple requires business users to install a music library to use its phone, I guess reflecting the device’s history as a music player. It is also a somewhat intrusive application especially on Windows.

If you then want to develop internal applications, you sign up for the iPhone Developer Enterprise Program. At $299 per year this is more expensive than the more...

I spent some time today watching parts one and two of Windows Phone 7 Jump Start presented by Rob Miles and Andy Wigley. After a slow start there were clear demos of basic coding for Microsoft’s new phone; and I’d guess that most Microsoft platform developers would be reassured that if they can code for Silverlight, or do games in XNA, they will not have any problem coding for Windows Phone 7. The further implication is that it will be relatively easy, with the proviso that complex applications with good performance and excellent design are never easy. There is also the challenge of learning Expression Blend, if needed.

All participants were asked to state what other mobile platforms they had developed for; and while we were not shown the results of these polls there was a comment to the effect that “Windows mobile and None are neck and neck”, which I found interesting. It suggests that iPhone and Android developers are in no hurry to learn about Microsoft’s phone. If Microsoft gets enough customers...

To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.

I’ve posted a lengthy interview with Don Syme, designer of Microsoft’s functional programming language F#

Quest Toad Extension for Visual Studio allows developers to work with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server and Oracle Database.  Grey Matter has teamed up with Quest to provide an exclusive introductory 20% discount on this product. 

Microsoft has released a PivotViewer control for Silverlight. Data visualisation is a key business reason to use Silverlight or Flash rather than HTML and JavaScript for an application, so it is a significant release. But what does it do?

Earlier this week I attended Adobe’s partner conference in Amsterdam, or at least part of it. The sessions were closed, but I was among the judges for the second day, where partners presented solutions they had created; the ones we judged best will likely be presented at the Max conference in October.

Seeing the showcased solutions gave insight into how and why LiveCycle is being used. LiveCycle is actually a suite of products – the official site lists 14 modules – which are essentially a bunch of server applications to process and generate PDF forms and documents, combined with data services that optimise data delivery and synchronisation with Flash clients, typically built with Flex and running either in-browser or on the desktop using AIR. These two strands got twisted together when Adobe took over Macromedia.

LiveCycle applications are Java applications, and run on top of Java Enterprise Edition application servers such as Oracle’s WebLogic or IBM’s WebSphere. This does mean that...

I want to introduce you to web service mocking and a tool you can use to mock web services, soapUI.

Today I was generating a typed DataSet, using the Data Source Configuration Wizard in Visual Studio (“Add New Data Source…” from the Data Sources window or Data menu). I had two stored procedures, accessing a linked server, in my database that I wanted added to my DataSet.

When it comes to writing T-SQL, one of my pet hates is the unnecessary use of loops and cursors. As we all know, SQL is a set based language and has been designed to work using sets of data. Far too often do I see people looping unnecessarily in their back-end code resulting in a slow user interface.

An attempt to clarify scenarios where Oracle Full Use licensing is required for testing.

I recently had cause to re-visit a solution already deployed and in live production. The solution is a BizTalk application that accepts orders from our clients and then loads them into our Order Management System.

DotNetNuke (DNN) is a multi-portal web content management system. The softwareknowhow.info web site is a working example of what can be achieved using the DNN framework. DNN started out as an application from Microsoft designed to demonstrate the functionality available in their new ASP.NET 1.0 platform. This application was named the IBuySpy Portal.