Tag Archives: software development

development, embarcadero, professional, software development

RAD Studio XE4 with Delphi for iOS is here. Who will use it?

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Embarcadero has released RAD Studio XE4, its suite of development tools for Window, Web and for the first time, Apple iOS. iOS support first appeared in an earlier release, but in preview, and the current effort works using a new LLVM-based ARM compiler so is somewhat unlike the preview. Individual products such as Delphi XE4 are also available separately.

Looking at what’s new in Delphi and C++ Builder in XE4 it is apparent that iOS support is by far the main change since RAD Studio XE3, though there are two other significant changes:

  • Prism, a version of RemObjects Oxygene that compiles a Delphi-like language to .NET (and soon other targets) has been removed. Oxygene lives on at RemObjects.
  • FireDAC, a data access engine acquired from DA-SOFT, is now part of RAD Studio.

I ran up the new RAD Studio on a Parallels VM on a Mac, a VM on a Mac being the best way to try cross-platform development for OS X and iOS. The new IDE immediately presents you with instructions on setting up for iOS development (though I am not a fan of videos, preferring clear text instructions) but I no problems configuring the Mac agent (called PAServer) which makes this work. Start a new mobile app and you can pick a starter template or begin with a blank canvas.

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I picked the Tabbed Application and was soon trying out my new app on the iOS simulator

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So far so good, though the ability to run up a quick app is no proof of the quality of the development tool. Still, a few reflections.

As I noted earlier, it seems to me that Delphi developers are either Windows developers using the tried and trusted VCL (in which case there is very little for them in XE4), or developers who are targeting mobile platforms and using the cross-platform FireMonkey framework in order to share code between Windows, Mac and mobile. I guess it is also possible that developers targeting iOS alone will be so taken with Delphi or C++ Builder that they will come in as new users.

VCL developers now have 64-bit compilation and a mature framework, and given that the efforts of Embarcadero are now focused elsewhere, and that even Microsoft is going slow on new features for what it now calls “desktop Windows”, there is little reason for such developers to upgrade.

The key questions then are about the quality of the FireMonkey framework and the iOS support. It is hard for me to be objective, since I know Delphi from of old and it is a familiar environment. Delphi or C++ Builder for iOS has obvious attractions for such developers. I would be intrigued though to know what an Objective C or even a JavaScript developer would make of Delphi, coming to it fresh. I am sceptical whether an Xcode developer would find enough productivity benefit in Delphi and FireMonkey to want to move over, and suspect also that many would not be impressed by the FireMonkey approach to iOS controls, which are generally custom drawn rather than true native, or faked completely like the Segmented Control which you are meant to put together from SpeedButtons with segmented styling, as explained in the Delphi iOS tutorial:

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Embarcadero is making a big play of being “true native” but native is not just about the executable code (I have written more about this elsewhere) and cross-platform always involves compromise.

There is also some disquiet in the developer community about the cost of keeping up to date with RAD Studio. The full RAD Studio XE4 Architect edition currently costs £2,892.60 ex VAT for a new user, or £1,927.80 to upgrade. If you just want basic Delphi, Delphi XE4 Pro is a more reasonable £642.60 for a new user, or £352.80 to upgrade – but you do not get iOS support for that, that is another £320.40 for the Mobile Add-on, and FireDAC if you need it a further £285.00. When XE3 came out, Embarcadero promised that iOS and Android support would be available later at a “low cost”; of course that is a relative and subjective term, but I can understand if some feel that the price is on the high side. Or you can buy software assurance and get upgrades free; I don’t have prices for that but the cost is significant.

It is unfortunate for Embarcadero that there is intense competition in the iOS tools space, not only from Apple’s excellent and free tools, but also from the likes of Xamarin and Titanium.

None of the above is intended to detract from the achievement of bringing Delphi to iOS, with Android promised, which is considerable.

.net, microsoft, software development, visual studio, windows

How to test and debug an app on Surface RT in a hotel room

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I wanted to test an app on Surface RT this morning, though I am out of the office with just a Samsung Slate (has Visual Studio), the Surface, and hotel wi-fi.

You can do remote debugging on Surface RT as explained here, however you need a private network.

I set up an ad-hoc network from the Samsung Slate as described here:

Open an elevated command prompt

netsh wlan show drivers

netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid="wireless name" key="password"

netsh wlan start hostednetwork

This allowed me to connect the Surface RT to a private network with the Slate.

Next, I needed to download and install the remote debugging tools for ARM from here.

I ran the remote debugger and was able to connect from Visual Studio on the Slate, but ran into a small issue. I needed a developer license for the Surface, but while on the private network it was not on the internet. When the remote debugger prompted to install a developer license, it could not retrieve it.

The solution was to disconnect, connect to the internet, then install the developer license using PowerShell. Run show-windowsdeveloperlicenseregistration from an elevated PowerShell window.

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Then I returned to the private network and was able to launch my beautifully designed test app:

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Note that for the actual test I did not run the app attached to Visual Studio. Rather, I deployed in release mode and then ran separately, to avoid the slowdown from the debugger. Once deployed, the test app remains in the Start screen for launching.

mobile, software development

RIM hints at move to license BlackBerry 10 OS to third parties

RIM chief Thorsten Heins says in an interview that his company may license the forthcoming BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system to third parties. Here is the key quote:

We don’t have the economy of scale to compete against the guys who crank out 60 handsets a year. We have to differentiate and have a focused platform. To deliver BB10 we may need to look at licensing it to someone who can do this at a way better cost proposition than I can do it. There’s different options we could do that we’re currently investigating.

He goes on to talk about:

… us building a reference system, and then basically licensing that reference design, have others build the hardware around it – either it’s a BlackBerry or it’s something else being built on the BlackBerry platform

The big question: would the likes of Samsung and Sony leap to manufacture BlackBerry OS smartphones when they can offer Android for free?

A more nuanced question: even if OEMs were to license BlackBerry OS, to what extent would they really get behind it, as opposed to cranking out a few devices to see how they went? The latter is what happened to Windows Phone 7, with the exception of Nokia late in the day.

Samsung manufactures Windows Phone 7 devices, but you would hardly know it, since it is the Android-based Galaxy range that gets all its attention.

Another problem for RIM is negotiating the tricky waters of both manufacturing devices and licensing the OS to others. Apple did not enjoy having third-party manufacturers like Power Computing, Radius and Motorola release Mac clones. Here is what Walter Isaacson writes in his biography of Steve Jobs:

Apple got an $80 fee for each computer sold, but instead of expanding the market, the cloners cannibalized the sales of Apple’s own high-end computers on which it made up to $500 in profit.

Microsoft is now coming at this from the opposite end, going into hardware manufacturing with the Surface, which is another interesting experiment.

Still, listen carefully to what Heins is saying. “We don’t have the economy of scale to compete against the guys who crank out 60 handsets a year.” It is not just a matter of coming up with a fantastic mobile operating system or even a fantastic device; it is all about ecosystem, as Nokia boss Stephen Elop stated 18 months ago. RIM’s ecosystem is in decline, and the company will explore every avenue in trying to turn that around.

development, professional, software development, visual studio

Developers like coding in the dark

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Many developers prefer to code against dark backgrounds, according to this post by Monty Hammontree, Director of User Experience in Microsoft’s developer tools division.

Many of you have expressed a preference for coding within a dark editor. For example, dark editor themes dominate the list of all-time favorites at web sites such as http://studiostyl.es/ which serve as a repository for different Visual Studio styles.

Chief among the reasons many of you have expressed for preferring dark backgrounds is the reduced strain placed on the eyes when staring at the screen for many hours. Many developers state that light text on a dark background is easier to read over longer periods of time than dark text on a light background.

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Personally I am not in this group. A white-ish background works well for me, and if it is too bright, simply reducing the monitor brightness is an effective fix.

Interesting post though, if only for the snippets of information about the new Visual Studio. Apparently it has around 6000 icons used in 28,000 locations. Another little fact:

Visual Studio’s UI is a mix of WPF, Windows Forms, Win32, HTML, and other UI technologies which made scrollbar theming a challenging project.

If you will be using Visual Studio 2012, are you on the dark side?

development, software development

The most enduring software development techniques revealed at QCon London

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I am in London for the QCon event, a vendor-neutral development conference which I have been fortunate to attend regularly over the last few years.

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These events tend to have an underlying theme, which reflects the current thinking of developers and software architects. Each year I hear cogent and thoughtful explanations of why this or that approach will enable us to code better and please users more. Each year I also hear cogent and thoughtful explanations of why the fix proposed last year or the year before is actually a prime reason why projects fail.

Way back when it was SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) that was sweeping away the mistakes of the past. Next SOA itself was the mistake of the past and we got REST (Representational State Transfer). This year I am hearing how RPC is making a comeback, or at least not going away, for example because it can be more efficient when you want to transfer as little data as possible across the WAN.

Another example is enterprise Java. Enterprise Java Beans and J2EE were the fix, and then the problem, for scalable distributed applications. Rod Johnson came up with Spring, the lightweight alternative. Now I am hearing how Spring has become bloated and complicated and developers are looking for lightweight alternatives.

Test-driven development (TDD) brings fantastic benefits to software development, making it possible to change and improve your code while defending against the introduction of bugs. Yesterday though Dan North observed that TDD also has a cost, in that you write much more code. It is not uncommon for projects to have more test code than code that is active in production. If you did not write that code, you could be doing other productive work in the time made available. 

Agile methodologies like Scrum were devised to promote or even create communication and agility in software teams. Now every big enterprise vendor says it does Scrum and runs courses, but the result is a long way from the agile (with a small a) original concept.

This year I have heard a lot about over-optimisation, or creating code for situations that in fact never arise. This is the problem to which the solution is YAGNI (You Ain’t Gonna Need It). Since they apply across all the methodologies, I suggest that YAGNI, and its cousin DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself), and the even older KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) are the most enduring software methodologies.

That said, even DRY took a beating yesterday. Greg Young in his evening keynote said that rigorous DRY advocates can end up creating single blocks of code where really the procedure was only nearly the same. If your DRY functions are full of edge cases and special conditions, then maybe DRY has been taken to excess.

In the light of the above, I would therefore like to propose the first draft of my first theorem of software development:

There is no development methodology which will not become a burden when embraced rigidly

The other lesson I have learned from multiple QCons is that effective teams and smart developers count for much, much more than any specific tool or language or approach. There is no substitute.

google, internet, open source, software, software development

How to brew better software: The Monki Gras in London

I attended The Monki Gras in London yesterday, a distinctive developer event arranged by the analyst firm RedMonk.

This was not only a developer event, with the likes of Andre Charland and Dave Johnson from the PhoneGap team at Adobe, Mike Milinkovich the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, and Jason Hoffman with Bryan Cantrill from cloud services (and Node.js sponsors) Joyent. It was also a serious beer event, complete with a range of craft beers, a beer tasting competition with nine brews to try, and a talk plus a free book from  beer expert Melissa Cole. An unusual blend of flavours.

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In charge of the proceedings was RedMonk co-founder and all round impressario James Governor. I am a big fan of RedMonk and its developer-focused approach; it has been a fresh and heady brew in the dry world of IT analysts.

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The Monki Gras did seem like an attempt by a regular IT conference sufferer to fix problems often encountered. The Wi-Fi worked, the food was fresh, unusual and delicious, the coffee was superb; though brewing good coffee takes time so the queues were long. Not everything scales. Fortunately this was a small event, and a rare treat for the couple of hundred or so who attended.

That said, there were frustrations. The sessions were short, which in general is a good thing, but left me wanting more depth and more details in some cases; we did not learn much about PhoneGap other than a brief overview, for example.

Nevertheless there was serious content. Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady made the point succinctly: IT decision makers are ignorant about what developers actually use and what they want to use, which is one reason why there is so much dysfunction in this industry. Part of the answer is to pay more attention, and several sessions covered different aspects of analytics: Matt LeMay from bitly on what users click on the Web; Matt Biddulph (ex BBC, Dopplr, Nokia) gave a mind-stretching talk on social network analysis which, contrary to what some think, was not invented by Facebook but predates the Internet; and O’Grady shared some insights from developer analytics at RedMonk.

I had not noticed before that github now gets nearly double the number of commits than does Google Code. That is partly because developers like git, but may also say something about Google’s loss of kudos in the open source developer community.

Kohsuke Kawaguchi, lead for Jenkins Continuous Integration and an architect at CloudBees, spoke on building a developer community. His context was how Jenkins attracted developers, but his main point has almost limitless application:  “Make everything easy, relentlessly.”

Something I see frequently is how big companies (the bigger the worse) place obstacles in front of developers or users who have an interest in their products or services. Examples are enforced registration, multiple clicks through several complex pages to get to the download you want, complex installs, and confusing information. It all adds friction. If the target is sufficiently compelling, like apps on Apple’s app store, developers will get there anyway; but it all adds friction, and if you are not Apple that can be fatal.

The Joyent guys did not speak about Node.js, sadly, but rather on the distinction between a VP of engineering and a Chief Technology Officer. Sounds dry and abstruse? I thought so too, but the delivery was so energetic that they were soon forgiven. Hoffman and Cantrill moved on to talk about management antipatterns in the software industry, prompting many wry nods of recognition from the audience. “It is very hard for middle management to add value,” said Cantrill.

Milinkovich made the point that the most valued open source projects generally make their way to a software foundation; PhoneGap to Apache is a recent example. He then gave the talk he really wanted to give, noting that as new software stacks emerge they have a tendency to re-implement CORBA, a middleware specification from the Nineties that tackled problems including remote objects, language independence, and transactions across the Internet. CORBA is remembered for drowning in complexity, but Milinkovich’s point is that the creators of exciting new stacks like Node.js should at least research and learn from past experience.

Milinkovich also found time to proclaim that “Flash is dead, Silverlight is dead, browser plugins are dead.” Perhaps premature; but I did not hear many dissenting voices.

I tweeted the conference extensively yesterday (losing at least one follower but gaining several more). Look out also for a couple of follow-up posts on topics of particular importance.

mobile, open source, professional

Appcelerator CEO on EMEA expansion, Titanium vs PhoneGap, and how WebKit drives HTML5 standards

I spoke to Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie yesterday, just before today’s announcement of the opening of an EMEA headquarters in Reading. It has only 4 or 5 staff at the moment, mostly sales and marketing, but will expand into professional services and training.

Appcelerator’s product is a cross-platform (though see below) development platform for both desktop and mobile applications. The mobile aspect makes this a hot market to be in, and the company says it has annual growth of several hundred percent. “We’re not profitable yet, but we’ve got about 1300 customers now,” Haynie told me. “ On the developer numbers side, we’ve got about 235,000 mobile developers and about 35,000 apps that have been built.”

Jeff Haynie, Appcelerator

In November 2011, Red Hat invested in Appcelerator and announced a partnership based on using Titanium with OpenShift, Red Hat’s cloud platform.

Another cross-platform mobile toolkit is PhoneGap, which has received lots of attention following the acquisition of Nitobi, the company which built PhoneGap, by Adobe, and also the donation of PhoneGap to the Apache Foundation. I asked Haynie to explain how Titanium’s approach differs from that of PhoneGap.

Technically what we do and what PhoneGap does is a lot different. PhoneGap is about how do you take HTML and wrap it into a web browser and put it into a native container and expose some of the basic APIs. Titanium is really about how you expose JavaScript for an API for native capabilities, and have you build a real native application or an HTML5 application. We offer both a true native application – I mean the UI is native and you get full access to all the API as if you had written it native, but you are writing it in JavaScript. We have also got now an HTML5 product where that same codebase can be deployed into an HTML5 web-driven interface. We think that is wildly different technically and delivers a much better application.

Haynie agrees that cross-platform tools can compromise performance and design, and even resists placing Titanium in the cross-platform category:

Titanium is a real native UI. When you’re in an iPhone TableView it’s actually a real native TableView, not an HTML5 table that happens to look like a TableView. You get the best of both worlds. You get a JavaScript-driven, web-driven API, but when you actually create the app you get a real app. Then we have an open extensible API so it’s really easy if you want to expose additional capabilities or bring in third-party libraries, very similar to what you do in Java with JNI [Java Native Invocation].

The category has got a bit of a bad rap. We wouldn’t really describe ourselves as cross-platform. We’re really an API that allows you target multiple different devices. It’s not a write-once run anywhere, it’s really API driven.

80% of our core APIs are meant to be portable. Filesystems, threads, things like that. Even some of the UI layer, basic views and buttons and things like that. But then you have a Titanium iOS namespace [for example] which allows you to access all the iOS-specific APIs, that aren’t portable.

I asked Haynie for his perspective on the mobile platform wars. Apple and Android dominate, but what about the others?

RIM and Microsoft are fighting for third place. I would go long on Microsoft. Look at Xbox, look at the impact of long-term endeavours, they have the sustainability and the investment power to play the long game, especially in the enterprise. We’ll see Microsoft make significant strides in Windows 8 and beyond.

Even within Android, there are going to be a lot of different types of Android that will be both complementary and competitive with Google. They will continue to take the lion’s share of the market. Apple will be a smaller but highly profitable and vertically integrated ecosystem. In my opinion Microsoft is a bit of bridge between both. They’re more open than Apple, and more vertically integrated than Google, with tighter standardisation and stacks.

I wouldn’t quite count RIM out. They still have a decent market share, especially in certain parts of the world and certain types of application. But they’ve got a long way to go with their new platform.

So will Titanium support Windows 8 “Metro” apps, running on the new WinRT runtime?

Yes, we don’t have a date or anything to announce, but yes.

I was also interested in his thoughts on Adobe, particularly as there is some flow of employees from Adobe to Appcelerator. Is he seeing migration of developers from Flex, Flash and AIR to Titanium?

Adobe has had a tremendously successful product in Flash, the web wouldn’t be the web today if it wasn’t for Flash, but the advent of HTML5 is encroaching on that. How do they move to the next big thing, I don’t know if they have a next big thing? And they’re dealing in an ecosystem that’s not necessarily level ground. That’s churning lots of dissenting and different opinions inside Adobe, is what we’re hearing.

We’re seeing a large degree of people that are Flash, ActionScript oriented that are migrating. We’ve hired a number of people from Adobe. Quite a lot of people in our QA group actually came out of the Adobe AIR group. Adobe is a fantastic company, the question is what’s their future and what’s their plan?

FInally, we discussed web standards. With a product that depends on web technology, does Appcelerator get involved in the HTML5 standards process? The question prompted an intriguing response with regard to WebKit, the open source browser engine.

We’re heavily involved in the Eclipse foundation, but not in the W3C today. I spent about 3 and half years on the W3C in my last company, so I’m familiar with the process and the people. The W3C process is largely driven – and I know the PhoneGap people have tried to get involved – by the WHAT working group and the HTML5 working group, which ultimately are driven by the browser manufacturers … it’s a largely vendor-oriented, fragmented space right now, that’s the challenge. We still haven’t managed to get a royalty-free, IPR-free codec for video.

I’d also say that one of the biggest factors pushing HTML5 is less the standardisation itself and more WebKit. WebKit has become the de facto [standard], which has really been driven by Apple and Google and against Microsoft. That’s driving HTML5 forward as much as the working group itself.

.net, professional, software development, web authoring

The mystery of unexpected expiring sessions in ASP.NET

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This is one of those posts that will not interest you unless you have a similar problem. That said, it does illustrate one general truth, that in software problems are often not what they first appear to be, and solving them can be like one of those adventure games where you think your quest is for the magic gem, but when you find the magic gem you discover that you also need the enchanted ring, and so on.

Recently I have been troubleshooting a session problem on an ASP.NET application running on a shared host (IIS 7.0).

This particular application has a form with some lengthy text fields. Users complete the form and then hit save. The problem: sometimes they would take too long thinking, and when they hit save they would lose their work and be redirected to a login page. It is the kind of thing most of us have experienced once in a while on a discussion forum.

The solution seems easy though. Just increase the session timeout.  However, this had already been done, but the sessions still seemed to time out too early. Failure one.

My next thought was to introduce a workaround, especially as this is a shared host where we cannot control exactly how the server is configured. I set up a simple AJAX script that ran in the background and called a page in the application from time to time, just to keep the session alive. I also had it write a log for each ping, in order to track the behaviour.

By the way, if you do this, make sure that you disable caching on the page you are pinging. Just pop this at the top of the .aspx page:

<%@ OutputCache Duration="1" Location="None" VaryByParam="None"%>

It turned out though that the session still died. One moment it was alive, next moment gone. Failure two.

This pretty much proved that session timeout as such was not the issue. I suspected that the application pool was being recycled – and after checking with the ISP, who checked the event log, this turned out to be the case. Check this post for why this might happen, as well as the discussion here. If the application pool is recycled, then your application restarts, wiping any session values. On a shared host, it might be some else’s badly-behaved application that triggers this.

The solution then is to change the way the application stores session variables. ASP.NET has three session modes. The default is InProc, which is fast but not resilient, and for obvious reasons not suitable for apps which run on multiple servers. If you change this to StateServer, then session values are stored by the ASP.NET State Service instead. Note that this service is not running by default, but you can easily enable it, and our helpful ISP arranged this. The third option is to use SQLServer, which is suitable for web farms. Storing session state outside the application process means that it survives pool recycling.

Note the small print though. Once you move away from InProc, session variables are serialized, not just held in memory. This means that classes must have the System.Serializable attribute. Note also that objects might emerge from serialization and deserialization a little different from how they went in, if they hold state that is more complex than simple properties. The constructor is not called, for example. Further, some properties cannot sensibly be serialized. See this article for more information, and why you might need to do custom serialization for some classes.

After tweaking the application to work with the State Service though, the outcome was depressing. The session still died. Failure three.

Why might a session die when the pool recycles, even if you are not using InProc mode? The answer seems to be that the new pool generates a new machine key by default. The machine key is used to encrypt and decrypt the session values, so if the key changes, your existing session values are invalid.

The solution was to specify the machine key in web.config. See here for how to configure the machine key.

Everything worked. Success at last.

development, software development

Holiday season free giveaway: a must-read for developers

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Among my top books for 2011 is this one by Jez Humble and David Farley. I reviewed it here, and it also sparked some discussion of what is the difference between the various continuous software development/deployment models.

I have a spare copy of this book to give away. All you need to do is comment to this post with a valid email address – this will not be posted or used for any other purpose, but I will use it to request your address if you win. Please do not include an URL as it risks being dumped in the spam bucket!

On  January 6th I will select a winner at random. I will post to anywhere in the world.

Update: I have selected a winner. To do so, I used Java’s Random class to generate a number between zero and one less than the number of comments. The number it came up with was 4, so the winner is Ian Smith, the 5th person to comment. Congratulations!

 

microsoft, software development

Not allowed in Windows 8 Metro: porn, ads in live tiles, bugs, or opt-out data collection

Microsoft’s newly published Certification Requirements for the forthcoming Windows 8 store includes some notable points. Here are a few that caught my eye.

2.3 Your app must not use tiles or notifications for ads

No complaints about that one.

3.2 Your app must not stop responding, end unexpectedly, or contain programming errors

Hmm, this could be a tough one.

3.3 Your app must provide the same user experience on all processor types

OK, no “Intel-only” features. However you could by implication submit an “Intel-only” version of your app as long as it is called something different than than the ARM version.

3.7 Your app must not use an interaction gesture in a way that is different from how Windows uses the gesture

This is interesting as an example of enforcing application style guidelines. The intent is a consistent user experience, but is this heavy-handed?

4.1 Your app must obtain opt-in or equivalent consent to publish personal information

No stealthy personal data collection. A good thing; though if opt-in means “Hand over your data or you cannot run the app” it can still be difficult for users to avoid.

4.4 Your app must not be designed or marketed to perform, instruct, or encourage tasks that could cause physical harm to a customer or any other person

What a relief!

5.1 Your app must not contain adult content

Windows Metro a porn-free zone? This could be troublesome though. No games beyond PEGI 16? This is a preliminary document and it would not surprise me if there is some change here; maybe this is a restriction for the beta period only.