August « 2012 « Tim Anderson's ITWriting

Delphi XE3 Professional downgraded to local databases only

By tim, on August 29th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

There is a bit of a stir in the Embarcadero community following the leaking of a document which appears to be an email to partners concerning a major change in the EULA (End User Licence Agreement) for the Professional edition of Delphi, the RAD development tool for Windows (with lately some cross-platform capability).

This email

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Guest post with a view from the enterprise: Microsoft is getting it right with Windows 8

By tim, on August 29th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

The following is a guest post from a contact who holds a senior IT role in the finance industry.

I think Microsoft is getting it right. I don’t recall saying this about anything they have done before, which makes this a matter of some significance to me. My view on W8 is that it

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IE10 and Do Not Track: ineffective with Amazon ads

By tim, on August 28th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

I set up Windows 8 on my desktop PC, accepting the default Do Not Track setting. This is still set:

However I noticed Amazon ads served by Google/DoubleClick on a third-party site that reflected my recent activity on Amazon. I clicked the Privacy link on the ad (which links to Amazon rather than Google)

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Windows 8 compatibility issues: speech input, secure Flash drives

By tim, on August 28th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Two items I have reviewed recently over on the gadget blog have given me pause for thought concerning Windows 8 compatibility. This is good in my experience when it comes to desktop applications, but sometimes that is not enough.

The first was Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12, Nuance’s excellent voice recognition system. It works fine on Windows

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Windows 8 sideloading and Embarcadero’s Metropolis fake-WinRT framework

By tim, on August 26th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Embarcardero’s John Ray Thomas and Jason Vokes spoke to me about the company’s forthcoming RAD Studio XE3 development tool and in particular the new Metropolis framework which creates apps that have the appearance of a Windows 8 “Modern UI” (formerly known as Metro) but which are really desktop applications. Metropolis works with both the Delphi/C++

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Developing for the Windows Runtime: a few more notes from the field

By tim, on August 26th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

I have been poking around in the code for my Windows Runtime ITWriting.com reader, which is based on this MSDN sample. The list of posts looks like this:

Not bad, but that block showing the date of each post is based on Windows Team Blog page, which is nothing to do with me. What

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The Windows Runtime App Certification Kit: not too good detecting crashes and hangs

By tim, on August 25th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Now that I have a lovely ITWriting.com App I thought I should check out whether it is ready to fly.

I therefore ran the App Certification Kit that installs with Visual Studio 2012.

The tool asks you to select an installed app and then exercises it. I saw my app open, though I did

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Developing a Windows Runtime app: some observations

By tim, on August 24th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

What would it take to create a Windows 8 Modern UI content reader for this site? Just for fun, I built a simple one; or rather, I slightly adapted Microsoft’s Metro style blog reader tutorial.

The app only has four screens (or pages) but despite its simplicity I found the tutorial somewhat fiddly. Getting the

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Third-party compilers locked out of Windows Runtime development

By tim, on August 23rd, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Embarcadero’s chief scientist Allen Bauer has posted about the problems facing tool vendors who want want to support Microsoft’s Windows Runtime (WinRT) platform with their own compilers, which he calls “Windows 8′s ‘dirty little secret.’”

The issue is that in order to enforce security and isolation in WinRT apps, Microsoft prohibits certain API calls. Even

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Reactions to Windows 8

By tim, on August 22nd, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

However this thing turns out, the reactions as Windows 8 rolls out are a great sideshow. The first steps with Windows 8 are demanding for users familiar with older versions as some things are different and some things worse than before. Some things are better, too, but getting over that initial hump can be a

…continue reading Reactions to Windows 8

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