Friday, July 28, 2006

Delphi IDE comes out tops in several sections in IDE survey

Evans Data Spring 2006 IDE developer survey lists Delphi first in several categories

I use BDS2006(Delphi) and Visual Studio 2005 a lot. The editor in VS is far superior in my opinion to anything else I have used. Having said that, BDS fights back with having a much faster debugging and compiling engine.

BDS is the only IDE that allows C/C++, Pascal(Delphi) and C# from the same IDE and it also compiles Win32 or .NET for Delphi and C++. If you are doing Win32 and are looking at upgrading to .NET in the future, Delphi offers a more or less painless upgrade path - no rewrite is necessarily needed.

It's a pretty impressive result for BDS and highlights again that there is a valid alternative to Visual Studio. Keep up the good work guys!




Programming
Software Development
IDE
Delphi

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Compact Framework 2 SP 1 Released

Available here : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0c1b0a88-59e2-4eba-a70e-4cd851c5fcc4&displaylang=en

Includes a quite a few bug fixes and a couple of new features.

Office 2007 Beta - Initial Impressions

First off I've gotta say I don't really get "hot n bothered" over an Office release. I like and use Word,Excel and Infopath and use Access a bit, but they don't really light my fire so to speak.

However, I am mighty impressed with my first play with 2007. Office apps have been resetting the benchmark as far as GUI goes for years, but they really have raised the bar with 2007. I really like the RibbonBar menu system and have been waiting for years for someone to come up with a better system than the traditional fixed menu. It groups actions in a logical manner and I found it made finding things really easy. I can see how it is going to confuse and annoy heavy Office users (that's people who use Office a lot - not people who eat a lot), but once they get over the shock and get into the new system they should start to like it.

The eye candy is nice too I guess, but wearing my IT Manager's hat (it's the dusty one in the corner I don't like wearing), I hope it doesn't add to the overhead when using via a Terminal Server session. I haven't looked into this so hopefully it doesn't.

Outlook was a little sluggish, but hey it's a beta. It doesn't appear to be too much different at intial view from the previous version. I tried to use the built in RSS reader feature, but it was slow and buggy so will wait until the next release before I comment further on that, but suffice to say it has some work still to be done IMHO.

Overall, judging by the Beta I think the next version of Office is going to be a good one.

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Monday, July 24, 2006

Hmmm....

I came across this from Scobles' blog, Life of a Geek » Blog Archive » I hate fake computer geeks

I'm not going to bag the guy who wrote it, many people have done that already. I kinda agree with Cody, a geek would rather do it themselves than have someone else do it, and I'm sure if Scoble was a college kid with all the time in the world, he could/would install his own Wiki software or run his own version of WordPress. I mean these sorts of thing aren't exactly difficult...

But, as Cody will learn, as you get older and more responsibilities, you learn not to sweat the little things. When you're young without too many ties then time is something that passes, rather than a valuable commodity. If someone can save you half a day by hosting your blog rather than doing it yourself,  then you get someone to do it. That's half a day you get to spend doing other things - like spending time with your family.

Is Cody more of a Geek than Scoble? Probably. Is Scoble a "fake geek" because he get s someone else to setup his wiki/blog? Definitely not.

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Monday, July 17, 2006

Blog of the year....

This blog is one of the list up for Blog of the year....
Vote Here

I'm not sure if I'm worthy to be honest. I had meant to post more code on my blog, but got caught in rant mode most of the time ;-)

Having said that I got a couple of notible commentators - Greg Stein from Apache and a lead developer on the Infopath team. Must be worth a couple of votes?!

Nic (Chicken Coop), Tim (Haines) and Jonesie (.NET Jonesie) blogs are probably more worthy though.

Good luck to all and whomever wins will deserve the lovely rubber ducky.

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