If your company is a one-man-band, like mine, you’ll like this story: Finding a Product Idea for Your Micro-ISV.
Dec 162004
Dec 162004
In a follow-up to Perry’s post (again) I wonder: why should one buy Delphi 2005 instead of Visual Studio for .NET? A manager sees:
Delphi 2005 Architect edition: $3000 (new user). Support is an optional product. Cheapest level includes only 3 incidents for 12 months (whatever comes first).
MSDN Universal: $2800 (new user) and that gives the user VS.NET Enterprise Architect, ALL Office applications (including previous versions for testing), LTU (albeit for development only) for all Windows OS-es, including pre-releases only available to subscribers, online support with a garantueed response of 2 days, 4 phone incidents)
If you or your company has a history with Delphi and you want to keep your existing codebase, I can see why Delphi 2005 is a logical step. If you’re choosing tools for a new project, I cannot see why one would not choose MSDN Universal.
Dec 162004
Yesterday I fooled around with the ODP.NET drivers from Oracle. Just to create a simple thing to proof the drivers worked, I dropped a OracleConnection and two buttons on a form, named one Connect and the other (guess what) Disconnect. I double-clicked on the Connect button, added a try-open-except-errormessage. At that time I didn’t notice the red underlining the .close statement had. I double-clicked on the Disconnect button and added a try-close-except-errormessage. F9. Delphi gave me an error on the open-property (duh, it’s not a property, it’s a procedure) of the Oracle-connection. I placed the cursor on the dot, removed the word “open” and the semicolon, and pressed Ctrl-Space. Hey, I thought, let Delphi do the work. I choose “procedure Close”, and pressed enter. Again, red underlining and still compiling did not work. WTF!?
Close all, save? No!
New C# project. Add Oracle-connection, and two buttons. No rename, just double-click. F*CK! (Excuse my French) C# needs () after a procedure with no arguments. F9. It works. I can connect and disconnect to my Oracle database.
WTF!?!?!?! Is Borland pushing us to use its C# to outphase Delphi???? 🙁
Dec 152004
After reading Perry’s post about NexusDB V2 public beta, I surfed over to the NexusDB site, to find that their embedded (v1.08) database is now free. You don’t get the source (optionally available for US$250), but other than that it’s there for you to use. They even updated it to be used with Delphi 2005. That’s great!
Dec 152004
When I look at the statistics for this weblog, recently a lot of searches for Bejeweled 2 Deluxe point to my website. Not surprisingly, because I wrote about it. What I don’t like, is that ALL searches include a hint of “I don’t want to pay for it, so where is the crack / keygen / hacked version”! I bought Bejeweled 2 Deluxe, although I didn’t like Popcap’s new 60-minutes-trial strategy. And I don’t regret buying it. The software is immediately activated after the buying-transaction, and you get 5 installs, in case something goes wrong with your PC, or you just want it installed on another one. The original Bejeweled was addictive, but with the new Powercubes and Hypercubes this version will even take more of your time!
Be a good computeruser, and buy it. Don’t hack it. Good games deserve to be bought. I bought a lot of games that cost 2 or 3 times what Bejeweled 2 costs, and I have played them only a fraction of the time I now spend with Bejeweled 2.
Dec 152004
Speaking about Java (see previous post): Sun is releasing early builds of Java 6.0 to the public via Early Access. If you’re into Java, you can’t miss out on this one.
Dec 152004
Really old versions of Oracle supported procedures in PL/SQL, later compiled Java was added. With release 2 of Oracle 10g the .NET CLR will be supported, meaning that you can store whatever compiled C#/VB.NET/J# or any other .NET-language into the database. Of course I don’t expect everything to work with this first release, but I like this move better than Oracle’s move to include Java. I’m just not into Java.
Read more about Release 2 here. The current planned date for Release 2 is around the middle of 2005.
Dec 142004
If you’re using Delphi 2005 (Diamondback, Delphi 9) to create an ASP.NET application and run it with IIS, you might want to debug it. But you can’t, since Delphi can’t connect (so it says) to the ASP.NET-workerprocess. This might be your lucky day: check out this post.
Dec 142004
Following Google’s desktop searchtool, Microsoft released a similar product: the MSN Toolbar Suite. It’s still in beta, and it still is free (you never know how long that will last with stuff from Microsoft), so get it while you can.
Dec 102004
No, I’m not talking about Mono, but native calls to the Microsoft .NET Framework. From Apache. I had that idea quite some time ago, but there was no mod_reroute_to_aspwpexe.dll or something like that to pull the trick. There is now! No more excuses to use IIS on your Windows-machine, Apache can do the .NET trick as well. Nicely handing over all .NET-calls (via mod_aspdotnet) to the .NET-workerprocess, keeping managed (.NET) and unmanaged (Apache) code separate.
Read all about this important module here.
I find it strange that this project did not get more attention. I want Apache, but not being able to “run” .NET stopped me from using it. I will now try to switch to Apache, since it gives me more freedom to use programs designed for LAMP. A lot of them just don’t work under IIS, since they rely on .htaccess or other internal Apache features.
If anybody knows of a good configuration tool for Apache, please let me know.