April 2005 Meeting Wrap-up

Here is the follow-up from the April 2005 meeting of the Boise Software Developers Group.

Chris B. did his review of Delphi for .NET develoeprs guide [Buy]. The book is divided into 3 parts: Intro to Delphi, Intro to .NET and Delphi for .NET. Overall Chris rated it really high for a Delphi developer moving into .NET. It had good coverage of some important areas. [ Full Review ]

Chris also reviewed Delphi 2005. His first big beef was the load time. I told him about the Delphi configuration manager ( See link below ) which lets you create a short cut that launches just Delphi win32 or any other configuration you can imagine. Really speeds up the startup process. Overall it is a powerful package that lets you do just about anything you want to do - combining Delphi, C#, Win32 and .NET into the same IDE and debugger. Maybe he will write up a review for this too.

Links from the meeting:

Delphi Configuration Manager - Lets you create multiple Delphi short cuts, each one launching its own Delphi configuration. Each configuration is seperated once it is made. So adding a component only gets added to one, unless you used the manager to propegate the changes.

Download details- CLR Profiler (v2.0) - Randy recommeds with code profiler for .NET. It is free from Microsoft. He was able ot use it to get himself out of a jam, but recommends starting to use it before you get into a jam.

DOSBox, a x86 emulator with DOS [on SourceForge] - Emulates a x86 DOS enviroment - with speed decrease and other controls for playing old DOS games. Has other uses for legacy software.

Mabus' homepage - Home of D-Fend a DOSBox frontend - A front end to make use of DOSBox easier.

MZ-Tools - Open source Commercial ( $39.95 to $399.95 ) plugin that adds refactoring and other productivity enhancements to Visual Studio .net 2003. Recommended by Dave H. I personally prefer DevExpress's CodeRush + Refactor!

Microsoft Action Pack Subscription - A way to get a lot of Microsoft products for a really steep discount (read the fine print). Does not include MSDN or development tools.

IT Conversations - A compendium of interviews and conference talks in audio format. A must visit for any IT professional.

Internet Archive - A massive collection of content on the Internet. Includes old public service movies, public domain works, dated archive of web page revisions, etc. Truly massive.

Next Month

Scheduled for the May 5th meeting:

Steve D. is doing either Aspect Orientated Programming in .NET or a review on Infragistics.

From Design Patterns Explained 2nd Edition:

• Chris - Object Pool
• Mike - Singleton
• Jim - Factory

See everyone next month!