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Maybe, just maybe, Borland is learning to be more open in their development tool roadmaps.
Naturally, the company has had their internal roadmaps that look aheads at least five years, but those plans have stayed strictly behind closed doors, and even not partners have had the chance to see them.
But now, maybe because of pressure from both Microsoft and customers, at least Delphi roadmaps are becoming public. BDN has an audio replay, and also several blogs reveal more information. Check them out. I'm waiting for the Highlander release, as I enjoy .NET 2.0.
While I'm writing this, Microsoft's PDC05 has just ended. Sadly, I couldn't attend the event, but still lots of interesting information is flowing my way.
The most buzz seems to related to the things C# 3.0 and the new LINQ project has to offer. There's a very interesting MSDN article about this written by Don Box and Anders Hejlsberg.
The LINQ project is about integraring SQL like data manipulation statements with normal programming language code, such as C#. This would really be a step forward, and I would love to see it live. Similar things are planned for Visual Basic 9.0.
Earlier this week, I had a phone coversion with a developer working for a Finnish company. We discussed about a development problem he had, and then our conversation turned to the future of the product he was using.
I started to discuss that a new version is coming later this year, but my customer quickly dismissed the topic by saying, "I'm not interested in what will happen in the future, and besides, I'm not making decisions here [at my company]."
This gentleman's attitude striked me. I understand there are differents kinds of people working in this business, and some are less enthusiastic than others, and just some days we have a bad day. But still.
I've always thought that software developers are people that are often interested in technology itself, and whenever a new tool comes available, they want to fiddle with it, despite the fact that they would need to continue using the old version.
Besides, I couldn't imagine myself as *not* getting interested if there's something new coming my way from a tool that I use every day.
I needed to buy myself an USB extension cable, and I decided to go mail-order. However, to my (bad) luck the shop I planned to use carried tons of different USB extension cables, and I confess I got confused.
All those A and B connectors and what have you were too much, and nowhere was there a "USB Cables Explained" topic to be found.
Simple images of the cables would have helped a lot, but they were missing as well. So, I needed to go to the USB.olg web site, and there those cables and plugs were explained.
And to help you, my reader, and also document the cables types to myself for later reference, here's a simple table:
The USB "A" (top) and |
The USB "B" plug |
As you can see, the images are just cheesy (as David "I" of Borland fame would put it), but luckily this piece of reference will help both you and I in the future.
PS. This is my first blog post with pictures. I promise better images next time. :-)
Well, my odd computer problems with large files finally became so frequent that I wanted to find the problem source, and not just guess.
The symptoms were these: when copying large files (200+ MB) from DVD to hard disk or from hard disk to USB drive, the almost constantly became corrupted.
However, for example .ZIP files have an internal CRC checksum, and on some occasions, large files were fine, and corrupted on other occasions.
I had long suspected my hard disk, but then I started doing plain-old file compares ("fc.exe /b" on the command line), and that revealed differencies in files, but every time at different addresses!
That made me think about my RAM (DIMM) chips, which I have four, at 512 MB each. I wanted to download a simple utility to test the chips, and to my surpirse I found that Microsoft has written one! It is named "Windows Memory Diagnostic" or "WinDiag" or "WinMemDiag". (Or just WMD, but that sounds scary.)
Now, this little utility proved to be a gem. It allows you to create book disk or a bootable CD-ROM (through an .ISO image), and once you boot your PC with the disk or CD, it starts to inspect your RAM.
It didn't take long until it find problems in one of my RAM chips, and it could even name in which bank it was in. Great tool!
I took that chip to my PC makes, and got a new one in exchange. It is the first time I've seen a Kingston memory chip fail, but I guess that can happen, too.
Best of all, now all my odd file corruptions disappeared. So my PC is humming again happily.
One of the things that I use to monitor the popularity of a certain tool and/or technique is the number of magazines that write solely about it.
Now, magazines writing about Borland's products are becoming quite rare. Luckily, some brave souls (in Russia, I believe) have just lately started to publish an InterBase magazine. This is a welcome addition to the current publication space, and important to Borland as well, I would say.
However, I'm a bit worried about Delphi magazines. Only one is left in England, The Delphi Magazine (TDM) to be exact.
However, TDM is going to have an announcement in their October issue, so we'll see how it turns out.
I needed a very simple piece of C# code: I wanted to launch a web browser with a given URL when the user clicked a picture in my WinForms application.
Initially, I didn't seem to find the correct keywords to find a solution with Google, but finally I did.
So, I'm sharing the code that I learned today:
private static void LaunchWebBrowser()
{
const string MY_URL = "http://www.saunalahti.fi/janij/";
// launch web browser
System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo startInfo =
new ProcessStartInfo();
startInfo.UseShellExecute = true;
startInfo.FileName = MY_URL;
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(startInfo);
}
Keywords for this sample code: open web browser, C#, example code, launch web page from Windows application.
My latest Delphi article appeared in the September, 2005 issue of The Delphi Magazine (issue 121).
The article was titled "Delphi Meets The Volume Shadow Copy Service" and it demonstrates how to use the about the Volume Shadow Service (VSS) that is part of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP.
A reader already contacted me regarding the article, and said: "...I must thank you for such a interesting subject and for the work you are sharing with the readers." He also had a concern, though. It was about backups of files that are written by applications that are not VSS aware.
Looks like the IT business is picking up after the summer again. In the past week, I've got two phone calls from companies trying to hire me.
That's all well of course, and I would guess the Microsoft MVP award has something to do with it. No complaints, really.
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