New Destination

As I am sure you have noticed by now, this feed hasn't been updated in a while.  The Boise Software Developers Group is now run by Chris Brandsma and uses a new content management system that does not include a news feed.  

If you are looking for a news feed to fill this gap try the following pages

• The Podcast at Delphi.org -Weekly podcasts on Delphi
• Chris' group technical blog Elegant Code - Includes prorgamming podcasts
• Jim's technical blog Davinci Unlimited 
• Chris' personal blog Programmers On Fire 
• Jim's personal blog Extrapolated Facts

Jim McKeeth has moved to the Seattle area, and is no longer involved in the Boise Software Developers Group.  For more information on the Boise Software Developers Group, visit www.bsdg.org.

This feed will eventually redirect.

ReSharper 4.0 Released

No more living life dangerously with beta versions and release candidates.  You can now get the real thing.
http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

 

JetBrains is a great supporter of user groups.  Please help support them!  :)

SQL Server 2008 RC0 is out

http://blogs.technet.com/andrew/archive/2008/06/06/sql-server-2008-rc0.aspx

Good to see this started.  I like that it is RC0 (RC-Zero) and not RC1.

Meeting 6/5/2008: Source Control and related tools

For anyone planning on showing up for our BSDG meeting tonight, we will be covering source control with Subversion.

Tools we will be using include:

VisualSvn Server
TortoiseSvn
SourceGear DiffMerge (file merging)
JetBrains TeamCity (continuous integration)
Notepad++

We will also talk about Nant, MSBuild, CruiseControl and Microsoft Team Systems.

Other items I'll be showing off include:

Microsoft Source Analysis (for C# only)
JetBrains dotTrace (if there is time)

I also have a stack of Asp.Net Pro magazines and some books to give away.

ReSharper 4.0 goes Beta (Candidate)

I just saw this on the wire: ReSharper 4.0 has entered Beta a Beta Candidate now as of build 804. If you want it, go get it here: http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/ReSharper/ReSharper+4.0+Nightly+Builds

If you just want to see what is new: check out this page:
http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/ReSharper/ReSharper+4.0+EAP+Notes

Finally, there is another deal going on at JetBrains.  DotTrace has gone to version 3.1.  For a limited time you can now buy the Personal version of DotTrace for $199.

Note: Ilya Ryzhenkov corrected me, this is just a Beta Candidate.

Meeting for May 1, 2008

We are having our monthly meeting tomorrow.

Topics:

• See whats new with SQL Server 2008 T-SQL.
• Get a look at using Sandcastle for converting code documentation in help files.
  

I have a bunch of giveaways (books, software, black t-shirts, etc), so I hope everyone attends.

Boise Code Camp 2008

Saturday, March 8th, 2008
At Boise State University in the
College of Business and Economics

Register today to attend free: www.BoiseCodeCamp.org

This free event for technical professionals is produced by the community, for the community.

Code Camp is bigger than ever this year featuring new and exciting technologies, training on fundamentals, a great party, and more.

• 63 sessions from 45 amazing presenters
• The best training value available anywhere
• Fewer slides, more code and examples
• Familiar names and local real-world coders side by side
• An incredible amount of talent and information
• Free lunch, dinner, swag, and giveaways
• Held during non-work hours (we have jobs too)
• Sessions for non-coders as well
• Amazing after party in the BSU stadium Hall of Fame room

No matter whether you are a seasoned coder, a student, a business analysis in software, a project manager, or a hobbyist technologist, there is something at code camp for you. Invest in yourself and come prepared to learn about these things and more:

• ASP.Net
• Agile / Methodology
• Architecture
• Client Development
• Databases and DB development
• Delphi
• Fundamentals
• Games & Graphics
• Google APIs
• I.T. And Operations
• Languages & Frameworks
• Mobile
• Security
• Web Development
• WCF, WF, WPF
• Virtualization
• XML and the Web
• Java, .Net, SQL, Oracle

Register today at www.BoiseCodeCamp.org.

Delphi Survey and the State of Delphi

CodeGear is doing their annual Delphi Product survey. If you haven't taken it yet, I would really encourage you to do it. I know Nick Hodges (Delphi product manager), and he reads all the comments and considers all the feedback very carefully when adding features to future versions of Delphi.

I found it took about 30 minutes to complete, but your mileage may vary. They won't share all the details of the survey, but they will share some of them.

Also, if you haven't seen it, I believe this is the latest Delphi Roadmap.

It still has D2007 as the to be released Highlander, but from everything I have heard, the 2008 Tiburón is still planned to have Generics (aka parameterized types) and Unicode in Win32 (Delphi 2007 delivered Generics for .NET). This is going to be a pretty big change for Delphi Win32. I know we have heard mention of Generics in Delphi for a long time now, but this looks highly likely with it on the official roadmap, and also with the fact it is in .NET and they like to maintain compatibility whenever possible.

While being really cool, the Unicode will also most likely require some code changes in existing applications to support it. Anywhere you assumed a Char to be a length of 1 will need to be updated. Also, storing non-text data in a string may not work right. There are a lot of people are cheering and a lot are grumbling. The survey actually touches on people's concerns with this.

Beyond Tiburón, in the 2009 time frame (code named Commodore) we will see native 64-Bit support, which is also a really big change.

There is also talk about a Delphi Parallel Library (which is actually on the RoadMap for beyond 2009). Allen Bauer has blogged about it quite a bit lately, so I am thinking / hoping it will be here sooner rather then later. The DPL is designed to take better advanced of all the multi-core/multi-processor systems out there. Beyond just thread pools and improvements on threading, I believe we will also see things like allowing a for loop to run each iteration on a different thread, and other language level awareness of multi-threading.

So some really big changes coming in the next couple years for Delphi! We are in exciting times to be working with in Delphi programming!

.Net Source code now available

You could always get the .NET Framework Library Source code with Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflectorand Reflector.FileDisassembler but now Microsoft went and licensed it to us. They also included comments and made it easy to debug into it, which is really cool.

The source is Reference Licensed, which means you can read it, but you can't use it. So unlike Delphi's VCL/RTL source code, you can't make an enhancement in the framework and recompile and ship. Nor can you build on the code in new and creative ways.

Interestingly, they changed the Reference License to specifically exclude anyone working from the Mono project to look at the source code (or to forfeit their legal ability to contribute if they do). But if the .NET Framework clone is for the windows platform, you can look all you want. Under the unmodified license, if you looked at the code, you couldn't build similar functionality on any platform. Now they only prohibit it on non-Windows platforms. So I wonder . . . If someone looked at the code to work on a Windows port of Mono, it would seem that would be permitted under the license. Then someone could take the new inspired code, and use that in a non-Windows port of the Windows port of Mono. Hmmm . . . I am not a lawyer, nor have a read the license, but it is an interesting proposition.

What to Expect in Delphi Unicode Support

Allen Bauer has a series of great blog posts (with more to come now doubt) outlining some of the technical details of what to expect with the new changes to support Unicode in the upcoming Tiburon version of Delphi.

• An intro to what to expect
• A great one on Unicode Character Categorization.
• Will there be a switch to turn String back to AnsiString? (Hint: No)
• More FAQ's about Unicode

So what is the reaction? Some people are grumpy that some of their code might break. Delphi has a long history of backwards compatibility. I am sure CodeGear will do what they can to make as much code as possible work, but this looks like it might cause some problems if you ever made assumptions about the size of a Char (which was generally discouraged) or used a string to store non-text (Which I am VERY guilty of. They are just so dang useful!) Personally I am really looking forward to Unicode in Delphi, even if there are a few growing pains.

On-line backup hosts

OK, we all know we need to back up our data.  And we have all been told to have an off-line location for all of our data as well.  More than likely, the business we work at does just that.

But at home? Not a chance.

Heck, we are lucky to have a backup anywhere.  Maybe your lucky enough to have several computers with large hard drives and you can copy your data between them.  Or, if you are really geeky, you have an external hard drive that you can pass around. That's a good start -- but what about the off site part?  Could be that is just too much trouble. But there are answers.

Several web sites are now offering off-site backup for home users, and for not much money either. Here are some solutions:

Mozy (a user group favorite): 2 gig free, $5 a month for "Unlimited space".  Might not be unlimited, but still a good deal.

IDrive: also offers 2 gig free.  You can map a drive to it (Vista is not supported), and "Unlimited Space -- 150 gig" for $50 a year (slightly cheaper than Mozy).  IDrive also supports versioning.

Carbonite: No free space, but everything else is comparable.

Of course, this blog is mainly read by developers, we want to backup our code, and there are lots of options for that.

If you don't care if someone else sees your code, things are easy and free.  The hardest consideration is do you want to store your code in Subversion, CSV, or something else.

SourceForge: the original.  Uses CVS and Subversion

Google Code: a new kid on the block, but very popular with many open source .Net projects. Uses Subversion.

Tigris: these guys make Subversion -- and offer space.  They also list a number of hosting site.

CodePlex: Microsoft sponsored site for open source projects.  You will find the AJAX Toolkit, and the Patterns and Practices stuff there.  I believe they use Team Systems for source control. Interestingly, you will also see many other open source libraries with listings there, but the code is actually on Google Code (because CodePlex doesn't support Subversion).

Commercial Hosting.  Lots of options here as well, and lots of price ranges.  Just Google "subversion hosting" and you will see a ton of options.  Price is one consideration, but also look for bug tracking while you are there.  Here are a few options:

SvnRepository: Starts at $4 month, includes 500MB and Trac for bug reporting.

CVSDude: Starts at $5 month, includes 100MB.  They also have Trac and Bugzilla, but you have to pay more.

OK, there are a few options, but not a definitive list by any stretch.  If I left something out, please leave a comment and I'll update the post.

ReSharper 4.0 -- getting closer

Looks like JetBrain's are trying to keep to their promise of an EAP by the end of January.

They have released a short feature list and hints that things are close now.

http://blogs.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2008/01/resharper-40-general-preview/

Here is hoping for my favorite tool.

(note to Code Rush -- really, I haven't tried your tool, I'm sure it has Mark Miller's awesomeness all over it.  Heck, I would get it for the "Create Skin File" refactoring -- I just haven't tried it yet)

Meeting PostMortem

Hi all,

We had a nice meeting last Thursday where Mike Chrisman proved he could write a C# program using Notepad++, and a NAnt script from memory while being heckled.  Proving one thing: he is braver then I.

He posted a blog on the topic as well.

While he was not able to convince everyone that the benefits of a one step build outweighed the work of creating the script, everyone seemed to agree that it would be a good idea to use with teams.  But heck, we haven't been able to get everyone in our group to agree on anything, so why start now.  :)

Next month

We talk about what to cover next month as well, and it looks like we will cover various web debugging tools.  Here are a list of tools that I will show off (these are just tools that I use)

• FireBug, which is one of the best html/css/javascript debuggers that I know (works only with FireFox). 
• YSlow
• IE Developer Toolbar, which tries to be FireBug for IE -- and almost gets there. 
• NotePad++: because NotePad isn't enough anymore
• Web Developer Toolbar: Not like FireBug, but interesting none the less.
• CSS Vista: a tool to compare css between IE and FireFox
• GreaseMonkey  -- this one is stretching it, so maybe.

My final tip for the day: in either FireFox or IE, did you know that Ctrl-R reloads the entire page?  I didn't until last week.

ReSharper 4.0 Roadmap

Looks like the good folks at JetBrains are hard at work on ReSharper 4.0.  The have now published the ReSharper 4.0 Roadmap.

For the brave: they should have a EAP sometime this January (2008), with the released product coming early this year.

Here is the full slated feature list (hopefully they get to everything):

• Support for both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008
• Comprehensive support for C# 3.0 language features, including:
  • New code analysis, context actions and quick-fixes
  • New refactorings (such as Convert to Extension Method, Convert to Automatic Property, Convert Anonymous Type to Named)
  • Updated IntelliSense
• Many more intelligence and productivity features
  • Full set of refactorings available for VB.NET
  • New quickfixes and context actions for XAML files
  • Referenced assemblies are now taken into account in null-reference analysis thanks to external annotations. ReSharper is packaged with annotations for the .NET Framework assemblies
  • Code Cleanup — a tool for ensuring compliance with code guidelines and enhancing code structure
  • Complete Statement — a feature that will complete language constructs and get you ready to write the next statement
  • Many other enhancements and new features throughout the product