C# frequently asked questions, I wish they kept updating this page
http://blogs.msdn.com/csharpfaq/

is really good from beginner to advanced, it covers a lot of questions in all areas

Virtual Earth - street level!
if you thought the maps war was over, check this out

http://preview.local.live.com/

Windows Class Viewer: I just found this gem
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cptools/html/cpconwindowsformsclassviewerwincvexe.asp

"The Windows Forms Class Viewer allows you to quickly look up information about a class or series of classes, based on a search pattern. The class viewer displays information by reflecting on the type using the common language runtime reflection API."

it gives you a nice, clean and quick view of all the members of a class (in C# code), WinCV allows you to load your own assemblies to browse

To use a single function to populate an objects data or to use individual properties?

I'm working on a project (which will be released to the public very soon) and I came across this dilemma, I had some code that looks like this:

myObject:=TSomeObject.Create;
myObject.Prop1:=value1;
myObject.Prop2:=value2;

but I had also previously created a method to assign all of the properties at once, so I could use this code as well

myObject:=TSomeObject.Create;
myObject.SetData(value1, value2);

now, the second code is shorter, but which code should I use?

I analized different factors that I usually worry about

- testability
- readability
- maintenance (I think there is a word "maintenancability" but is way too complicated)
- error prone (I'm sure there is no word for "error pronability" ;P)

In this case I decided to use the SetData method first of all because
- having values in all of the properties was critical,
- if I had to add properties to this object I could add them to the SetData function and the compiler would immediately report back all the places where I needed to change my code to accomodate for the new property
- if I used the code to assign values to each property, I would have to search my code for places where the object is instantiated to see if the new property is required there

of course this doesn't apply to all the cases, but if you think you are going to be adding properties to a class in the future, and you want to make sure that the value is provided for the new property, breaking your code this way might be the way to go

Sun and REAL Software after Delphi developers
According to the Reg Developer these two companies are working (separately) to get the (ex)Delphi developers, now that Delphi is going who knows where

you can read the full article here

so the more they delay to sell/buy the Delphi IDE, the bigger problem they will have to bring it back to life

OnTime Bug Tracking Software for only 5 USD (3 day offer)

for those of you that don't keep up with Scoble and don't know about this

I quote from Axosoft's site:

"Axosoft is conducting a social marketing experiment. We are giving away 5-User copies of OnTime 2006 Small Team Edition, a product we sell for $495 for just $5 ($1 per user!) . This offer is just available through social marketing sites and there are no links to this page on the Axosoft web site."

if you have a small company of just a few developers, it might as well be worth to give it a try, if at all, you only have 5 bucks to loose

check it out!

SysInternals ProcessExplorer version 10 released
if you haven't used SysInternals tools, you have been missing a LOT (they are REALLY good, and they are FREE), now if you have been using them, then it's time to update your ProcessExplorer tool, there are so many new features that you definetely want to upgrade to the latest version

you can download it here and see the full list of new features

Dreaming about the future of Delphi

what would happen if one of these would buy the Borland tools

Google: Google has never promoted a language like Delphi, they are more on the python or perl kind of language, but certainly if Google bought Delphi the expectations would be very high, what would Delphi bring to google? well, since it seems the rumor is official about google creating their own version of Linux, Google/Delphi could bring RAD to Linux!
it wouldn't necesarily be the Delphi language that they would promote, they could use the IDE to promote C++ or C# to get a bigger market

Microsoft: Very unlikely, at this point Delphi wouldn't bring anything to the table for MS, but maybe they would be interested in buying JBuilder, to, even though they already have J#

RemObjects: first of all I don't even know if these guys have enough cash to buy Delphi, but in case they did, what would Delphi bring for them? probably the name and the actual IDE, they pretty much already made their minds with the Pascal Language (Chrome) and they have been focusing more on the language than on creating IDE kinda tools
update: Mark Hoffman from RemObjects, has already expressed his position
basically RO won't be buying Delphi, but they will support it wherever Delphi goes

IBM: I don't have much to say about them, other than another probably good potential buyer

The Delphi community (and C++ and C#, in both Windows and Linux for this matter!): At this point I even doubt there are enough Delphi programmers left to be able to buy Delphi, it would be nice if this happened, but at the same time it would be hard, for a long time lately there has been a lot of discussion about if Delphi should have such or such feature, having it open to the community would certainly create a lot of heat, what's in it for us, or for other non-Delphi guys? the big one here would be Kylix!, so we should probably focus on that, and focus on C++ and C# development all in the same IDE, so we can get other people involved, since the Delphi community alone probably wouldn't be enough

you can sign the petition to save the Borland Programming Tools here

Delphi contrasts
Today I received my Experts Exchange award T-Shirt for being in the top 15 experts on the Delphi area!!, that's really cool

at the same time, today Borland finally made it official
Delphi is for sale

basically accepting what they never have accepted, that Delphi is dying, that Borland doesn't care about Delphi anymore

I can understand all these guys are just doing their job
http://blogs.borland.com/ao/
http://blogs.borland.com/abauer/
http://blogs.borland.com/johnk/
http://blogs.borland.com/davidi/

they just keep saying that this is good news, that this is good for Delphi, but the reality is that this is called uncertainty, how can we say that this is good when we don't even know who's buying Delphi or what's going to happen to it

it was coming... all the excuses about the trial or personal versions of Delphi, Borland forgetting about Kylix, Danny leaving Borland, the versions of Delphi that went unfixed, etc, etc, there was no interest from Borland, and people had to move on

I guess that's the bright side, on the last years Borland did nothing but just screw Delphi

trust has been lost, many companies have already moved away from Delphi and they are not coming back, it will be a hell of a job for anyone who buys Delphi to bring it back up to what it was, simply the best in it's class, no one else coming even close

one excuse was that there is no tool like Delphi to do Win32, and that is true, but Win32 only has a few years left to live, excuse is that Delphi/Kylix is an alternative in Linux, truth is that Borland abandoned Kylix a long time ago, excuse is that only Delphi allows you do to Win32, .NET and Linux in one IDE, but that was just the idea, in the practice they didn't come even close to such thing, excuses, excuses... at last they quit killing Delphi, at last they're letting it free, we can just hope that whoever comes in will do a hell of a job, the future looks dark for Delphi

I have been doing Delphi since it wasn't even Delphi, and I'm sad and dissapointed, this is the end of an era, Delphi has died today... let's see what it will re-encarnate into

Super Vision

Wired news is running a story about PixelOptics, those guys are working in some technologies to improve/correct eyesight, they say in the future it may go beyond 20/20, that's amazing, it brings hope to many people to be able to appreciate things that they just can't anymore

I found my deleted post (kinda)
in one of my machines I have a RSS reader running all the time, and it captured my post about "google takes you to the movies"

but I can't find that on my blogger account, weird

it might be related to blogger.com not liking Internet Explorer 7

Blogger deleting my posts =o(
yesterday I posted abot one of the cool features in google, search for a movie title, say Glory Road, google will give you an option to enter your zip code to find show times in your area

msn shows good links, but not quite that kind of option at all

I like that google feature

Time to update your browsers!!!
Microsoft just announced the official availability of Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 open to the Public

I just downloaded it, and so far is looking great!, a bunch of new really cool features, the ones I liked more are
- Advanced Printing
- Instant RSS
- the little preview button for the tabs, you have two options, a little menu from where you can select which page (tab) to go to, or a preview of all the pages loaded in the tabs, and you are able to close them or go to one of them, really cool
- the new menu options available on the tool bar area

and of course you have
- the tabbed browsing (better than firefox)
- Toolbar search box
- a bunch of security features
- pop up blocker
- etc, etc, etc

you definetely have to download it and give a try, I think you'll like it

click here to go to the IE7 download

now if they only added incremental search it would be perfect!

but that's not it, FireFox came up with an update too!
in their case, seems they have been listening to the complains about the memory leak problems

in FireFox you have to go to the Help and click Check for updates, so far is looking good, it takes a lot less memory after getting the update