BorCon Jacket Winners

Dale gave away some nice leather jackets to some lucky BorCon attendees. The only person who's name I know is Robert Love. If you know any of these people post a comment with the image file name and their name, maybe a link to their blog / home page too. I also have much larger versions of these pictures if you want a picture of yourself.

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More BorCon Photos

Here is the T-Shirt and Hat that they were giving away.  These aren't the default ones everyone gets, you had to be lucky.  Although I saw Nick with two hats on at one point.  The shirt wasn't very colorfast.

At The Tech Museum they had this robot that would spell things out in blocks.  Some people tried to get it to spell dirty words, which it wouldn't do.  Someone else had it write "C IS DEAD JIM" on the left, while I had it write "DIAMONDBACK" on the right.  It is pretty fun to watch.

Here is a picture of Danny Thorpe during the Meet the Team session.  He was signing Diamondback CD's.

Finally this is the picture of Robert Love with Dale after Robert won a jacket at Meet the Team.  I think he had to guess the code name for JBuilder 1.

BorCon 2004 T-Shirt

I really like the logo on the T-Shirts this year. Same theme, but they made the icons look cooler, and they are popping out at you. "Unleash the Power" is a cool slogan too.

Delphi Informant Complete Works CD

Delphi Informant is publishing one last complete works CD for 2004. While it may have gotten pretty then towards the end, it was a good 10 years. There is nothing wrong with having a concise magazine - More to read and less to skip.

Features

• 10 years of articles - Delphi 1 through 8
• Full text and source code from every article
• Searchable
• Bonus unpublished articles

All that for $49.99 with free shipping. You can pre-order now.

Firefox / Mozilla / Thunderbird Extensions How-To

Found a page with links providing How-To's on extension development for the Mozilla family of browsers. It uses XML and JavaScript stored in a JAR file. When I saw the JAR files I just assumed it was Java. A JAR file is just a ZIP file that has been renamed and that contains a manifest.

Borland the Arms Dealer

Last year at BorCon Borland was trying to position themselves as Switzerland. They wanted to be neutral in the platform wars between Java, .NET and Win32. They weren't going to take sides, and they would be there for you irregardless of which battle you are fighting.

This year I didn't hear much talk about Switzerland. Although it wasn't actually said, I kind of get the impression Borland is more of an arms dealer. They sell weapons, tools and supplies to both sides.

TeamB in the Santa Cruz Sentinal

Anders has some pictures taken by a photographer from the Santa Cruz Sentinal. Nice group photo, as well as one of just Anders and Nick Hodges. Now we need someone to put a name to each of the faces, a guide to TeamB of sorts.

Great Information on Mono

I stumbled on this post in the Agile Hacker Blog about Mono. It has links two three articles by Charlie Calvert about Mono from the BDN as well as many others.

• Installing Mono: Running .NET on Linux and Windows by Charlie Calvert
• WinForms: How to Use Mono to Get Microsoft .NET GUI Based Applications Running on Linux by Charlie Calvert
• Running Code Behind ASP.NET CSharp Projects on Mono by Charlie Calvert

Too Much Information and not Enough Brain Cells

As I try to go through and post all the BorCon notes and photos that I didn't get posted from the conference I am also looking through everyone else's BorCon blogs, as well as the papers on some of the other sessions I was not able to attend. Talk about information overload! It will take me at least until next years BorCon to absorb it all.

• Nick's Delphi Blog
• BorCon 2004... Serge's Blog
• Joe White's Blog
• Robert Love
• Craig Stuntz
• Dr. Bob's
• Allen Bauer
• Musings, Written on Infinite Tape
• Chuck's Corner (aka BorCon After Hours)
• Marco Cantu
• Paul Gustavson
• Euan Garden

Please let me know if there are others that I am not listing

Refactoring with Jim Cooper

Jim Cooper of Tabdee and Falafel Software presented Introduction to Refactoring. Jim is a great speaker. It is understandable why his More Design Patterns in Delphi was so full. If you want to know more about refactoring, then get Martain Fowler's Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

Refactoring is changing code after it already works. It is a series of small steps to minimize bugs. Should use unit tests to verify you don't break it. Refactoring does not change the behavior or add new features.

Code is not for computers to read, it is for programmers to read. Most programs spend 90% of their time in maintenance mode - refactoring makes code easier to maintain. Since the code is easier to read, bugs are easier to find. In the long term it is faster, short term it will take longer. Reduces chaos in long-lived code. Fowler formalizes and names the best practices of refactoring.

Opportunities for Refactoring

• When adding functionality - makes adding new features easier, but keep refactoring separate from changes.
• When fixing a bug
• During a code review
• Refactoring does take time though
  • May need to sneak it past managers at first
• Eventually you will refactor as you go and will not be separating it.

Points to Note

• Refactoring is typically based on OO
• More atomic then patterns, but may use patterns
• Most don't concern interfaces, but some may work with them
• Many refactorings include other refactorings, or one is required before the other can be applied.
• Some are opposites (extract method, inline method)

Thoughts on Refactoring: Most successful applications spend most of their time in maintenance mode, where you are fixing minor bugs or making other minor changes. If the application has been properly refactored then these small changes take very little time. Otherwise these changes are very expensive. Refactoring pays for itself in the long run if your application has any sort of life span. Refactoring doesn't mean the code was written wrong to begin with either.