Visit site Coding with the enemy
August 2011
16
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Delphi for iOS!
Coding with the enemy
– I attended the Rad Studio World Tour today in Auckland. Delphi XE2 has some nice features (x64, OSX, FireMonkey) but the standout for me was the iOS support.Developing for the iPhone et al is mostly a pain in the proverbial. XCode is somewhat of a mess and Objective C was designed by someone with ...
June 2011
4
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Delphi image components, ImageEn has a new home
Coding with the enemy
– If you have used image editing and manipulation in delphi, there is a good change you have used or heard of ImageEn components. I have used them in my photo printing program, Pics Print.The ImageEn component suite has now moved to delphi shareware company Xequte. You can find them at ...
March 2011
10
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Helpful tips for US based developers AKA Short date time is evil
Coding with the enemy
– English is a bit like html. There is a standard, but not everyone understands it, and there are a number of slightly incompatible implementations.This is most obvious in spoken English where accents, and idioms vary wildly causing mutual incomprehension.The last time I was in the USA, I had the ...
December 2010
2
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Developing on the Win phone 7 hardware without a developer account
Coding with the enemy
– Microsoft have released a free toolset for developing Windows Phone 7 applications. However you cannot debug or deploy onto actual hardware until you create a developer account @ $99 per year.In my case, I only have a demo phone for 2 weeks so a developer account seems like a waste of money.To work ...
2
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Developing for Windows Phone 7 in a virtual machine
Coding with the enemy
– According to Microsoft, installing the windows phone developer tools into a virtual machine is not supported. This is because the phone emulator is itself a virtual machine and, as Inception has shown, running a virtual machine inside a virtual machine gets really slow. The emulator also requires ...
September 2010
0
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.net Unit Testing 101
Coding with the enemy
– Links, slides and sample code from my .net Unit Testing 101 presentation.NUnit - unit testing library TestDriven.net - Visual Studio integrationLightspeed ORM Free or full version is needed to run the sample codePragmatic unit testing ebookPresentation and code
March 2010
2
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Windows Phone 7 - A party pack of sweets for developers
Coding with the enemy
– They are playing advertisements for Pascall's Party Pack on TV at the moment. The tag line is "All sweets you love, and one you can't stand." That pretty much sums up Windows Phone 7 for developers. Lots of goodness with a few things that may leave a bad taste in your mouth.Despite the name, ...
February 2010
2
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Solving a mid-life crisis with a Solid State Drive
Coding with the enemy
– My development laptop is now 18 months old, which makes it older than me in computer years. As part of a mid-life refresh, I replaced the boot drive, (250gb 7200rpm) with an Intel X25M 160gb ssd.The result of this is that things are much snappier. How much snappier? I timed a few things of ...
January 2010
2
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[.net] Using sql server full text searching with Mindscape's LightSpeed
Coding with the enemy
– Advance warning: This post is only of use to people using Lightspeed or suffering from insomnia. The problemFor my current c# project, I am using Mindscape's Lightspeed O/R framework. Lightspeed is a mighty fine product that makes object persistence a breeze. I would kill to have this in ...
December 2009
1
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Solving Excel's "DBCC TRACEON" error with brute force and ignorance
Coding with the enemy
– We use excel reports extensively for reporting. They are fast to create and everyone can read and manipulate them. However there are the occasional gotchas. In the past, I have had to muck about with macros to fix connection string errors. We upgraded to sql server 2008 on the weekend. Following ...
November 2009
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Why I am moving from delphi to .net
Coding with the enemy
– This post is somewhat of a conterpoint to Why we didn’t convert to .Net. And perhaps we never will… I would have writen a post earlier, but I have spent most of the last week writing a tender proposal. The tender was for a claims management application with 70 users scattered across the country. ...
September 2009
0
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D2010 suppport in tiOPF
Coding with the enemy
– tiOPF is a Object Persistence Framework. That is, it is a framework based around saving your objects to, and loading them from, databases and/or flat files.Delphi 2010 support has now been added to the latest repository version.No release has been made as of yet, so you need to to retrieve it from ...
1
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C# for the iPhone: Monotouch released
Coding with the enemy
– Novell's MonoTouch product has been released. MonoTouch is mono for the iPhone.This allows compiling .net applications to native code and deploying to the iPhone.There are akready 200 apps in the app store using Mono via Unity so the underlying technology is fairly well tested. MonoTouch adds ...
August 2009
11
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When you install Delphi 2010, put it in a virtual machine
Coding with the enemy
– I recently compared the performance of virtual machines with the real hardware. The figures were suprisingly good.Shortly after that, disaster struck. My laptop wouldn't turn on. It took Dell 2 weeks to fix, replacing the motherboard and the video card.If I had delphi installed directly, I would ...
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Changing Excel query connection strings
Coding with the enemy
– We use Excel and database queries extensively for reporting purposes. It's quick and easy to set-up, and provides reports that our clients can manipulate.However I have recently run into a rather painful excel quirk with ODBC connections: Excel stores the database connection string internally. ...
