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Delphi 10.3 Rio has been out for awhile now, in fact, I recently installed the second update, so this post is a little late to the party but I thought I shared my thoughts anyway.
I needed to reinstall Delphi 10.2 recently and when I did, I finally decided to check the box that asks if you want to hook up a source code repository. I've always managed source in repositories outside of the IDE, but decided to see if and how much productivity improvement could be had it was built in with the project manager. I use Git so selected the installed git-cmd.exe file when prompted.
Way back in 2000, InterBase 6.0 was made open source. Soon a fork was made in the code and Firebird SQL was born. I started using this new powerful database engine and as InterBase went back to being a closed-source product, stuck with the free version or used other database engines. Many tools and Delphi component sets still support both IB and FB as they are still quite similar.
I work on a variety of projects in several different versions of both Delphi and Visual Studio. A lot of these projects also include database access. To support all these different projects, a lot of different tools need to be installed and with each comes a set of paths that are setup for the applications to find libraries, support tools, and so forth. Since most software tools can also generate both 32-bit and 64-bit code these days, there are often two sets of paths for each type of compilation.
Lots of changes to write about since the last blog entry over a year ago.
Delphi has come a long ways since it was first released in 1995. It now compiles 32-bit or 64-bit, still creates console or Windows applications but now also can create Android and iOS apps if you have the FireMonkey library and cross-platform tools, you can create Android and iOS apps.
As an independent software developer, I make my living writing scripts and applications for others. In order to maximize my opportunities, I need to be a master of many environments. Since much of my career has involved Windows applications, I am spending quite a bit of effort in other areas.
Having worked in Delphi for many years, I've seen the development tool and it's RTL evolve significantly, yet remain resilient in backwards compatibility. Early on, to prevent your application from running multiple times, there were generally two different approaches:
Why is it that when companies have a good thing, they have to go mess it up by changing its design? I've seen this in many different industries but since change happens so much more quickly in software, I seem to be annoyed much more often with changes in user interface.
DevArt Software has been busy at producing a great number of database tools and components for both Delphi and Visual Studio developers over the last few years. They're still coming out with new ones as well. One of the most recent additions is dbForge Data Generator for SQL Server. I purchased version 1.0 in April, 2015 and they've been hard at work improving and adding features--they're already at version 3.5! You can read about their features on their web site linked above, but I'd like to highlight a few I think are notable and have been very useful to me.
Programmers can be grouped into two broad categories: 1) Career Developers, and 2) Passionate Technologists. Career Developers will pick a language and a job and be very good at what they do, produce excellent work for their employer, and live happily ever after.
A friend of mine runs a business selling a Windows application for a niche market. Of course he has a web site with lots of information and a way to download a trial of his software and then pay and register it. Since he's a technical person, likes writing code, likes to keep overhead low, and his needs are fairly simple, he wrote the registration program himself. He's most fluent in Delphi so it was natural to write the registration program in Delphi--an old, but very functional Delphi 2007.
Some of my blog entries are just to remind myself how to do things later--and on several occasions they've been useful in that regard. I hope they are also useful to others that may encounter similar struggles. This is another one of those articles which I will likely refer back to at some point.
I'm a long time Delphi user and have taken advantage of the Object Repository quite a bit. It's really handy to take a unit or project that might be useful somewhere else but in a slightly different form and add it to the repository. Later, when you need to use that bit of code, you can select it from the repository right from within Delphi and it will make a copy of that code in your new project.
I've been spending a lot of my spare time with RemObjects products (mostly Oxygene and Hydra) over the last several months and haven't kept up my blog on those subjects like I intended. But another distraction is taking an increasing interest as more of a fun hobby than a dire need that will make me money.
I recently watched most of a dotnetConf, a virtual conference on .NET hosted by Microsoft. All the sessions were recorded and there's a lot of good and relevant content.
I was programming Win32 apps in Delphi while listening and I felt myself yearning for the cool technologies they were discussing. Yeah, Delphi has grown up a bit, but it's no longer the leader, it's following and getting further and further behind the rest of the development community.
Several months ago, I posted a question about developer tools and felt I was at crossroads of sorts. The choice to move away from what is familiar is never easy, but I felt stronger about taking a hard look at the future of how I would approach software than I had in the past.
I've used Pascal-based compilers for a long time. Similar to many others like me, I started with Turbo Pascal 3 in the 80s, embraced object-oriented extensions in Borland Pascal, attempted to understand OWL but quickly moved to Delphi when it was released, and now churn out blazing database applications on the latest Windows operating systems using internet technologies, advanced reporting tools, and multiple third-party component sets. Sure, I've dabbled in other languages such as C/C++, Visual Basic, .NET with C#, and some scripting languages, but Delphi has been the bulk of my experience for the past 17 years or so.
