ldsandon's blog

With the demise of XP - and next year Windows 2003 Server will follow - it is time to really think about modernizing the design and implementation of your applications, and especially write the new ones from start as real Windows Vista+ applications - you can maybe also skip Vista ;) To modernize your application, you don't need to buy Delphi XE6 as Embarcadero tries to make you think you should.

Last weekend, thanks to May Day holiday well placed on a Thursday, I was able to spend four days at the "Po Delta Birdwatching Fair", an annual fair dedicated to birdwatching and natural photography, held in Comacchio, a little ancient city nearby the Po river delta, and in the middle of the shallow waters "valleys" which are now a natural reserve where many different kind of birds reside, or rest for a while during their annual migration from and to Africa and Northern Europe.

Each day a photographic workshop held by natural photographers working especially in that area, and covering different aspects of this kind of imaging, from ethical considerations to posprocessing, paved the way to excursions lead by the same photographers in one of the best places to capture excellent image.

Because it's much easier to cut and paste from a browser!
That's a joke, of course, but sometimes not far from truth. Especially, I found surprising how many Linux site offer only some "I did this way" explanations, usually followed by a long list of commands, without any explanation. I've seen people copying them with very little changes if nothing at all - usually configuring their systems the wrong way.
CLI and configurations are good when you know what you're doing - not as copy&paste containers...

There is lately a trend, pionereed by applications like Skype and now commonly used by Chrome, that totally ignores Windows guidelines, rules and best practices, installing executables in folders like <appdata> instead of <program files>. The reason is simple: now Windows enforces proper security rights, and thereby unprivileged users are not able to write into folders designed to host executables.

This is not a rethorical question. And not because now Delphi targets OSX, iOS or Android, and it applies to those writing Delphi applications that runs on Windows only. There's a real difference, and it's important to understand it especially now the usual lame BorInCodeDero marketing is trying to use the end of Windows XP support to sell Delphi upgrades. But is Delphi today a real Windows development tool? My answer is no.

Michael Swindell just blogged this: The Walking Dead Season Premiere: Starring Delphi - did he understand that TV show is about Zombies? Yes, probably the right place for Delphi... and its average developer LOL!
Oh, there's also a book about OS/2 Warp... but that got buried, eventually...

Today François Piette has written about "Path issue when having installed a lot of software": Windows is having some trouble with very long path environment variable, even in Windows 7. This is true.

In his post Blackberry is Still Ahead of Microsoft, Jim McKeeth uses US numbers only to try to demonstrate that Embarcadero should never support Windows Phone, up to the point to say that Blackberry is ahead of it.

Many developers learnt first to code on isolated machines - DOS ones if they are old enough - or within simple networks. DOS was a single process, single thread environment, almost always on isolated machines. Maybe a modem to connect to a BBS, LAN were much rarer. That meant developers had little to care about "the environment" their application where "living in". Once the application was started, it was the only one running (but some tricks like TSR) and could use all the resources available. Slowly, the environment changed.

If you try to post a comment to Jim McKeeth The Podcast at Delphi.org  blog while you're behind a company proxy, you get this error:

Your comment has been blocked because the blog owner has set their spam filter to not allow comments from users behind proxies.