1. The install on Windows 7 64-bit was not totally smooth. First Avira Antivir claimed that a file installed during setup, called convert.exe, contained a virus (not the fashionable new one, something else called DR/Delphi.Gen dropper). I thought this was most likely a false positive. I tested the file with with Kaspersky which declared it clean, and I’ve emailed Avira about the problem.

I’m not sure why I bother at all with running anti-virus software. It is very little use. After all, what is the point of having it, if when it claims to find something you ignore it? On the other hand, what is the chance that this is a real virus on Embarcadero’s new CD, that Kaspersky does not detect?

None of this is Embarcadero’s fault, of course, unless it has shipped a virus, which I doubt.

2. Next, on running and quitting Delphi 2010 for the first time, the Windows Program Compatibility Assistant was triggered. See this earlier post for what this guy looks like and what it does. This one made the same change, ELEVATECREATEPROCESS.

A minor niggle perhaps, but it looks bad. At this stage, the Delphi team should have come to terms with UAC and made RAD Studio properly UAC-aware. I’m guessing most of the team run with UAC disabled.

3. Another UAC issue. When the IDE starts up, you get a message:

Error executing ‘C:\ProgramData\{BBD31133-40F8-4B57-9BA6-DB76C03D153B}\Setup.exe’: The parameter is incorrect

This does not occur if you run as administrator.

4. I ran up the IDE and noticed there is a new documentation wiki with user contributions. I think this is a great idea. It seems to be built with mediawiki. Unfortunately it failed with “A database query syntax error has occurred”. Update: it’s working now.

5. I’d understood that Delphi 2010 is somewhat Windows 7 ready. It has great support for multi-touch and gestures. That’s fine, but I was interested to see how to support the Windows 7 Jump Lists. A Jump List is the menu that pops up when you right-click a taskbar icon.

Well, if support for this is there I can’t find it. There is support for the Windows 7 Direct 2D Canvas, and as I mentioned for multi-touch, but that’s about all I can find.

It’s a shame because only a few people will be using multi-touch in the near future, and Direct 2D is not a feature visible to users, but the new Windows 7 taskbar and its features – there’s also the ability to add controls to taskbar preview windows – is the thing that every Windows 7 user will notice.

Of course you can easily call the Windows API from Delphi, and the community will figure out how to support these features before long; there’s already an alpha “Windows 7 controls for Delphi” that Daniel Wischnewski has come up with. But I’d like to have seen it in the box, and it would have been a nice selling point.

Don’t let me put you off. There are other new features – including Firebird support, integrated code formatter, better thread debugging -  and no doubt the core of Delphi is as good as ever (no 64-bit yet, but it will come eventually).

Still, my impression is that Embarcadero still has to work a bit on that last degree of polish. One final gripe: why is the discussion forum so darn slow? It has also been in beta forever.

More information here.

Related posts:

1. Delphi and C++ Builder 2009 are available to order
2. What’s new in Delphi 2009
3. Delphi developer virus exposes weakness in anti-virus defences

This malware was highlighted by Sophos though one thing Sophos does not make clear (as it is in the scaremongering business) is that the virus has only a mild affect. It only affects machines with ancient versions of Delphi installed – versions 5, 6 and 7 according to Marco Cantu – and its activity appears to be limited to replication. In other words, a successfully infected machine modifies Delphi’s runtime library so that it compiles infected executables, but does nothing else that I know of.

The implication is that the anti-virus companies, far from doing a great job at protecting us, have only just spotted a problem that has been around for months or possibly years. The burner.exe I found was dated 16 June 2009. If anyone has an older example, I would be interested to know; I’ve seen one report of an August 2008 infection.

Thus, when Delphi Product Manager Mike Rozlog comments to the Register’s report:

The best ways to combat these types of issues are to establish a deployment protocol that checks for viruses and trojans before shipping any applications

you have to ask: how? Clearly scanning with an anti-virus product would not have helped ProtectedSoft. Note that Sophos admits in its database that protection has been available only since 18 August 2009.

Despite the mild impact of W32/Induc-A (as far as we know so far) it is not something to take lightly. The attack looks like a proof-of-concept, to be followed by similar code with more serious impact, or possibly just an experiment that escaped into the wild. Maybe there are other more serious variants that the vigilant anti-virus folk will find in a month or two’s time.

How then can developers protect their machines? Another Reg reader says:

Instead, people should try to ensure the integrity of their development systems. Don’t connect them to the ‘net and don’t play games on them (duh!). Don’t have any foreign executables on them besides the OS and the compiler, transfer the sources there and compile them there. Run some kind of integrity checker to make sure that your compiler distribution hasn’t been tampered with. That sort of stuff.

Good advice, though not trivial to implement. A suggestion for Embarcardero: how about giving some thought to the problem and coming up with an easy means for developers to check the integrity of their runtime library files?

The disturbing aspect of this story is how malware can end up in shipping software from reputable companies; it could even be signed code. How long before something like this ends up in an executable shipped with an operating system itself, maybe with a timed payload so it lies dormant until well distributed?

Related posts:

1. Sophos Windows 7 anti-virus test tells us nothing we don’t already know
2. Anti-virus failure leaves XP broken, DNS hijacked, user frustrated
3. Microsoft plans free anti-malware

The tools covered are Eclipse, Embarcadero’s Delphi, IBM’s Rational Suite, IntelliJ, Microsoft’s Visual Studio, NetBeans, Oracle JDeveloper and Sun Studio.

I was sorry not to see more products covered. Flex Builder Flash Builder, Zend Studio, Aptana and JBuilder would all have been interesting, for example. Each developer only scored the product they actually use (a good thing), so the sample is not as big as it first appears.

I’m also mistrustful of the survey results, particularly when you look at it in detail. For example, one of the categories is “Support for frameworks”.  Visual Studio came top, while Eclipse was last. But hang on: in Visual Studio (for example) are we talking MFC, or .NET Framework? The development experience for each is totally different. And were developers primarily judging on the framework tools, or the framework itself? It is hard to attach much meaning to the scores in this category.

Another flaw: the versions of the products is not specified. That means a weakness may have been fixed in a later version, but the survey does not tell you.

A third flaw: some tools are weak in several categories, dragging down their overall score, but that does not matter to developers who do not use them for that purpose. It is hard to compare like with like.

Still, while I’m wary of the survey overall, I though it brought out some interesting points. One is that developers were asked what features matter most to them. So:

The three things developers care about most (highest priority first):

1. Basic tools (editor/compiler/debugger)

2. Documentation

3. Tool integration

The things developers care about least (lowest priority first):

1. Support for remote development

2. Support for parallel programming (sorry Intel!)

3. App Modeling tools

What about the winners and losers in the survey? I almost forgot. IBM’s Rational Suite came top, followed by Microsoft’s Visual Studio. Eclipse came last, though it still got a decent score, well below its rival NetBeans.

The low ranking for Eclipse (which is nevertheless wildly popular) deserves some comment, particularly as the top tool, IBM Rational Suite, is built on Eclipse. I spoke to Eclipse executive director Mike Milinkovich while researching this Register piece recently. One of the points we discussed was the tension (if there is one, which he disputes) between tools vendors sharing resources to build the best possible platform, and holding resources back to retain commercial differentiation. I’ll write this up in more detail shortly; but it shows why certain areas in Eclipse may not receive the attention they deserve – localization was a specific example.

Another problem with Eclipse is that it is all a bit messy, confusing and hard to manage, particularly in a team where you want every member to have an identical setup. It is still worth it though, for the riches it provides for free.

Related posts:

1. Eclipse survey shows Windows decline
2. When will PHP Developer Tools be mainstream at Eclipse?
3. Borland keeps its developer tools after all

Related posts:

1. Delphi moving towards cross-platform, 64-bit
2. No native code development on Windows Phone 7 says Microsoft – so what about Flash?
3. Embarcadero RAD Studio 2009 is done

Project X is the one that particularly grabs my attention. Cross-platform Delphi has been tried before, with Kylix, Delphi for Linux. Although promising, Kylix suffered on the technical side from Wine dependencies and on the marketing side from lack of demand for Delphi desktop applications. I do not have any technical information about Project X yet, but on the marketing side Mac OS X (and perhaps iPhone) is a great deal more promising than Linux.

After suffering from under-investment for many years, it is great to see Delphi now getting a new lease of life in its new home, and I’m looking forward to finding out more.

Related posts:

1. Embarcadero CEO on cross-platform native code
2. WPF/E preview is out – but no cross-platform .NET for now
3. Prism: official Delphi language comes to Visual Studio

Acquiring Borland and the Compuware Testing and ASQ Business will give Micro Focus a leading market position in the highly complementary Application Testing / ASQ market. This market is estimated to be worth c.US$2 billion a year and is logically adjacent to Micro Focus’ core application management and modernization business.  The move into the ASQ market is consistent with Micro Focus’ stated strategy of extending in logically adjacent segments to expand its addressable market.

Why sad? Well, if you were around in the eighties and nineties you will remember a bold company which came up with a series of excellent products: Turbo Pascal, Borland C/C++, Quattro Pro, Paradox, and of course the incomparable Windows development tool Delphi. The visual development model in Delphi was successfully transitioned to Java in the JBuilder product, which in its early versions used a Delphi-compiled IDE.

These developer-focused products live on, of course, mostly in the hands of Embarcadero. The Borland that has been acquired is what was left when, in my developer-centric opinion, the best parts had already left.

What went wrong at Borland? It is mostly the victim of changes in the industry, made worse today by the economic downturn. It was a tools company, and the tools market was hit by the double blow of excellent open-source competition on one side (Eclipse, GCC) and vendor-subsidised tools on the other (Visual Studio).

Still, there were some spectacular own goals along the way. The 1991 acquisition of Ashton-Tate, at the time the market leader in PC database managers, was one, mainly because dBASE IV was not very good and did nothing to help Borland transition to Windows; in any case, Borland already had a better product in the form of Paradox.

Talking of Paradox, Paradox for Windows was another disaster. Wonderful product, but mostly incompatible with its DOS predecessor, and probably a tad too complex as well. It also had to compete with Microsoft Access, which was both cheaper and part of the impregnable Microsoft Office suite.

The company made up for it with Delphi; but even that under-performed relative to its quality. Enterprises felt safer with Microsoft’s Visual Basic. JBuilder did well at first; but its market share diminished rapidly in the face of competition from Eclipse and NetBeans. In retrospect, Borland should have made its core Java IDE free much earlier, to build a community round it, though competing with free is never easy.

Since it was so hard making money out of compilers and IDEs, Borland changed tack in order to target Enterprise ALM (Application Lifecycle Management). It could have worked, but it wasn’t actually a great fit with the independent developers who formed a large part of its customer base, and who tended to ignore large, complex and expensive supplementary tools in favour of just getting on with coding.

The nadir was 1998 when Borland changed its name to Inprise, to reflect its Enterprise focus. “Many thought Borland had gone out of business”, says Wikipedia. It was changed back to Borland in 2001.

Another mis-step was the way Borland (then Inprise) handled InterBase, its client-server database. In 2000, with a burst of community enthusiasm, the product was made open source. A couple of years later, it changed its mind and continued to develop InterBase as a proprietary product; but by then FireBird had been born, based on the open source code.

Thought for the day: Borland paid more for TogetherSoft in 2002 (around $185m, including $82.5m cash), than Micro Focus is paying now for Borland.

Related posts:

1. The Compuware tools that are going to Micro Focus
2. Borland keeps its developer tools after all
3. CodeGear (Borland) to support PHP tools

Looking at the UK prices, RAD Studio starts at £979.00, whereas Delphi starts at £549.00. Upgrades are much cheaper – less than half the price in some cases. The message seems to be: get RAD Studio if you think you might need more than one of these three products.

I’ve been asked whether the upgrade to Delphi 2009 is worth it. I have no idea, of course, since it depends what you need it for – though if you need Unicode I’d have thought it was worth it for that alone. I do think it is the best so far in the post-Delphi 7 series. Personally I prefer it to Delphi 7 as well; though check Mason Wheeler’s comments to a previous post for a contrary view. Vista compatibility is another advantage, though you can hack this in any version of Delphi. I doubt that Windows 7 will be much problem here; it is close to enough to Vista that the same stuff should work fine.

Related posts:

1. Prism: official Delphi language comes to Visual Studio
2. Code for Mac Cocoa in Visual Studio – surprised to see this?
3. Delphi and C++ Builder 2009 are available to order

It was interesting to do some work with Delphi 2009. It has the old problem: out of date documentation. Here’s what it says about PChar, in the entry on pointer types:

The fundamental types PAnsiChar and PWideChar represent pointers to AnsiChar and WideChar values, respectively. The generic PChar represents a pointer to a Char (that is, in its current implementation, to an AnsiChar).

Further, if you have the following code:

var
strTest: PChar;
begin
strTest := StrAlloc(6);
strcopy(strTest,’Hello’);
strdispose(strTest);
end;

and hover the mouse over strTest in the editor, the pop-up tip says:

strTest – System.PAnsiChar

However, this is wrong. In Delphi 2009, a generic PChar is a PWideChar. Here’s the code in SysUtils for StrAlloc:

function StrAlloc(Size: Cardinal): PChar;
begin
{$IFDEF UNICODE}
  Result := WideStrAlloc(Size);
{$ELSE}
  Result := AnsiStrAlloc(Size);
{$ENDIF}
end;

UNICODE is defined in Delphi 2009, so StrAlloc returns a PWideChar.

Related posts:

1. SQLite wrapper for Delphi
2. Extend SQLite with Delphi functions
3. SQLite with Delphi

full support for the .NET framework 3.5 (WinForms, WFP, Silverlight, ASP.NET, WCF, LINQ) … CodeGear will provide Datasnap 2009 integration and dbExpress for ADO.NET support

It looks as if this will be a full alternative language for .NET developers. Note that many of the language changes, such as generics, in the Win32 version of Delphi 2009 seemed to have .NET compatibility in mind. It makes sense for Embarcadero to use Visual Studio to host .NET development tools, just as it uses Eclipse for Java.

There remains an awkward question. What advantage is there in using Delphi (a version of Pascal) rather than C# for .NET development? If this is aimed only at existing Delphi developers migrating code, it will only ever be a niche.

Not good news for RemObjects Oxygene, which is also an Object Pascal add-on for Visual Studio; but Oxygene has some other tricks like Mono support, for running on Linux, which may sustain it.*

I am trying to clarify a couple of points. To what extent, if at all, will Prism support the .NET version of Delphi’s VCL (Visual Component Library), which would not fit smoothly with the Visual Studio design tools? Even if VCL.NET applications work, you would probably be better off using Delphi’s own IDE for them. Code ported from Win32 Delphi will likely use the VCL, so this is tough to get right. And what is the future of Delphi for .NET in RAD Studio? I will update this post when I know more.

*Comments below suggest that this is in fact Oxygene rebadged; I won’t say more until I’ve got official confirmation.

Related posts:

1. Code for Mac Cocoa in Visual Studio – surprised to see this?
2. Embarcadero RAD Studio 2009 is done
3. Generics, anonymous methods, Unicode coming to Delphi

Delphi: a secret weapon for Windows developers

Is Adobe Flex and Air in your future?

The latter post is already out of date, following Google’s Chrome announcement. In it, I summarize the different approach to Rich Internet Applications, and argue that rather than discussing RIAs we should simply talk about the next generation of the client. I noted that “Google and Mozilla are also stretching browser technology”; now that we have Chrome this looks like a full-on battle.

Related posts:

1. RIA (Rich Internet Applications): one day, all applications will be like this
2. John Resig makes the case for standards-based Rich Internet Applications
3. Tim Bray’s contrarian views on Rich Internet Applications