This Week’s Poll, Delphi at Tech Ed and 2009 Ship Date

[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] Since I’m preparing a series of posts about (and eventual publication of) Smoketest, my own testing framework, I thought I’d test the water with this weeks poll and see what – if anything – people are already using as far as unit testing goes. Also I thought I’d briefly mention that I am at Microsoft Tech Ed ’08 (NZ) this week, and it was good to see that the NZ CodeGear reseller, Developer’s Inc were handling a steady stream of traffic at their stand where Delphi 2009 was on display (in the form of data sheets :)). I asked when Delphi 2009 was expected to ship and was told that it had been released to manufacturing and was on target to start shipping on 20th September – I forgot to ask whether that was an NZ date or worldwide. Not quite from the horses mouth, but pretty darn close. 🙂

Class Helpers – Ruling from the Appellate Court

[Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes] My previous post on class helpers provoked a passionate response from some quarters who believed that they could be used “safely”.  More worrying was an apparent belief that their use was actually endorsed by CodeGear – tacitly or otherwise.  A rather odd view given the advice from CodeGear themselves is to not use them. No-one actually described a safe usage scenario though and those scenarios that were described all contained immediately apparent flaws of their own.  However, I have realised that there is, if not a safe way then at least a responsible one, to create class helpers. Using them is still not entirely safe however.