Working Day Survey

[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute] Prompted by a recent question/survey thread on the NZ DUG mailing list, I’ve posted a new poll (see panel, left) seeking to gain a picture of the working day of Delphi software development professionals.  The nature of the questions mean it’s an unavoidably wordy poll, but I’ve tried to keep it as manageable as possible whilst also providing some useful insight into what we are doing and with what tools. I’ve already completed the poll with my answers reflecting my working day here at Flow. The results could be interesting and the more people contribute the more useful it will be, so tell all your Delphi friends. 🙂

Wringing Yet More Speed from MIDAS.DLL

[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute] Cameron Hart at Flow Software has just blogged about a change he identified in MIDAS.DLL to significantly improve the performance (and capacity) of client data sets when handling large volumes of records and BLOB fields.  Basically he seems to have taken the work previously done by Andreas Hausladen and applied it to BLOB’s.

Absolute (for) Beginners

[Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes] I casually suggested the use of the “absolute” keyword in response to a question on the NZ DUG mailing list today.  I thought nothing of it but someone mentioned that it had been years since he’d seen anyone use it, so I thought maybe it was worth bringing to wider attention.

Commitment Issues

[Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes] No, not a relationship blog and no, not a rant about the relationship between Embarcadero and the Delphi community.  This is a strictly and purely technical post about what “Committed” means in terms of Windows memory, and in particular a key aspect of how that applies to threaded applications.

The Turbo’s… Success or Failure?

[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] In recent discussions about the merits (and/or otherwise) of a free/cheap/cheaper edition of Delphi, it was suggested that the Turbo editions were either a run-away and disastrous success that stole sales from Delphi or that they were a complete flop, leading to the conclusion that there was no demand for an entry level edition of Delphi.

Delphi Unicode = Wide-ANSI

[Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes] Be careful what you wish for. A lot of people were overjoyed to hear that Unicode support was coming to Delphi. Some were skeptical of the chosen implementation approach however, it all seemed just a little bit too easy. I was one, and sadly it seems I was right.