Moving...

I'm moving to WordPress

Here's the partly populated board - the propeller chip and the EEPROM are installed. You can't see the blue LED flashing...

Windows 7 and Karmic Koala

I upgraded my Toshiba laptop to 4GBytes of memory and a 500MByte drive. Then I installed Windows 7 - it detected the wireless network but not the graphics. I couldn't find a Windows 7 driver for 64 but the Vista one worked fine.

Ubuntu Karmic Koala running from the live CD worked fine but now it's installed it first had issues creating a FAT32 partition (kept failing) then the wireless doesn't work (worked on live CD).

Hmm...

Update: after rebooting Ubuntu, the wireless network worked fine. Also let me create a FAT32 drive, label it, format it and leave a file for Windows 7 to see. Windows 7 didn't offer me the option of using FAT32 to format...

Making a synth...

And so it begins...

Delphi 2010

The last version of Delphi I bought was Delphi Professional 2006. I didn't rate at all. Buggy, slow, broken help... sigh... I felt the days of Delphi were over. That and Kylix (stagnating at V3.0) and the change of hands of "CodeGear".

Delphi 2007, 2009... finally 2010

After an initial false start (see earlier posts), I managed to get Delphi 2010 Architect trial to install. I wasn't expecting much but...

• Generics
• RTTI access methods
• Attributes

Interesting... ah, but...

• Broken help (no news there, then)
• Still have to declare variables outside a function/procedure
• Still circular uses dependency restriction

I did a comparison with a C# app. While I find the C# language easier to work with, Delphi runtime is a lot faster. A simple graphical app seemed sluggish in .NET but rapid in Delphi.

The biggest area of Delphi is not so much the IDE, the documentation or the language, but the VCL. Standard tree control in WinForms doesn't support multiple selection - in VCL it's an option.

The price of upgrading to Delphi 2010 Professional is about £340 - that's not cheap compared to previous versions. They're offering BOGO at the moment, so I took the plunge and bought Delphi 2010 Pro upgrade and BOGO'd a copy of C++ Builder 2010 Pro as well.

After my two year break from Delphi going back is a bit traumatic. C# has spoilt me with the depth of the language. Delphi feels... antiquated.

C++ Builder never impressed me much. Everything I threw at it had problems. Seems this time it has improved, so maybe there's hope yet!

CodeGear forums fail

Trying to post a question to the Delphi forums is no fun:

(not sure where to post this...)

How do I pass a Delphi string to a function expecting WCHAR* in a Visual C++ DLL?

I tried declaring the parameter as filename: PChar (and PWideChar) but I don't see the string being passed.

I get the following mess on the screen:

HTTP Status 500 -

---

type Exception report

message

description The server encountered an internal error () that prevented it from fulfilling this request.

exception

com.jivesoftware.base.UserNotFoundException
 com.codegear.jive.cdnauth.CDNUser.loadFromMembers(CDNUser.java:83)
 com.codegear.jive.cdnauth.CDNUser.(CDNUser.java:28)
 com.codegear.jive.cdnauth.CDNUserManager.lookupUser(CDNUserManager.java:34)
 com.jivesoftware.base.UserManagerAdapter.getUser(UserManagerAdapter.java:82)
 com.jivesoftware.base.UserManagerProxy.getUser(UserManagerProxy.java:60)
 com.jivesoftware.base.action.interceptor.AuthInterceptor.processAwareInterfaces(AuthInterceptor.java:61)
 com.jivesoftware.base.action.interceptor.AuthInterceptor.intercept(AuthInterceptor.java:43)
 com.opensymphony.xwork.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:190)
 com.opensymphony.xwork.interceptor.AroundInterceptor.intercept(AroundInterceptor.java:31)
 com.opensymphony.xwork.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:190)
 com.opensymphony.xwork.interceptor.AroundInterceptor.intercept(AroundInterceptor.java:31)
 com.opensymphony.xwork.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:190)
 com.opensymphony.xwork.interceptor.AroundInterceptor.intercept(AroundInterceptor.java:31)
 com.opensymphony.xwork.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:190)
 com.opensymphony.xwork.interceptor.ExceptionMappingInterceptor.intercept(ExceptionMappingInterceptor.java:186)
 com.opensymphony.xwork.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:190)
 com.opensymphony.xwork.DefaultActionProxy.execute(DefaultActionProxy.java:116)
 com.opensymphony.webwork.dispatcher.DispatcherUtils.serviceAction(DispatcherUtils.java:225)
 com.opensymphony.webwork.dispatcher.FilterDispatcher.doFilter(FilterDispatcher.java:202)
 com.jivesoftware.base.action.util.JiveFilterDispatcher.doFilter(JiveFilterDispatcher.java:68)
 com.jivesoftware.util.SetResponseCharacterEncodingFilter.doFilter(SetResponseCharacterEncodingFilter.java:61)
 com.opensymphony.module.sitemesh.filter.PageFilter.parsePage(PageFilter.java:118)
 com.opensymphony.module.sitemesh.filter.PageFilter.doFilter(PageFilter.java:52)
 com.jivesoftware.base.theme.ThemeFilter.doFilter(ThemeFilter.java:50)
 com.jivesoftware.base.util.webwork.JiveActionContextCleanUp.doFilter(JiveActionContextCleanUp.java:38)
 com.jivesoftware.base.util.JiveCompressionFilter.doFilter(JiveCompressionFilter.java:123)
 com.jivesoftware.util.SetRequestCharacterEncodingFilter.doFilter(SetRequestCharacterEncodingFilter.java:72)
 com.jivesoftware.base.util.MaintenanceFilter.doFilter(MaintenanceFilter.java:83)
 com.jivesoftware.forum.upgrade.UpgradeFilter.doFilter(UpgradeFilter.java:49)
 com.jivesoftware.base.plugin.PluginFilter.doFilter(PluginFilter.java:56)
 com.jivesoftware.base.util.ApplicationInitializedFilter.doFilter(ApplicationInitializedFilter.java:81)

Delphi 2010 is out!

So Codegear have released Delphi 2010...

Can't even download the architect trial. My user page shows an error but not what the actually error is!

Anyway... once I got past this error (I've no idea what I did to fix it), I finally got the license key to install Delphi 2010 Architect Trial.

Delphi hasn't changed much. Still need to declare variables outside of code (not block scoped) and still need declaration and implementation sections. C# looks much nicer in this respect.

C++ Builder seems to have improved so it might actually be usable...