was Firebird, now, brain farts

Yesterday I attended a Delphi 2010 talk and made a bunch of notes I intend to blog about. Trouble is I have a few minutes now on the train, so just want to make one point.

In Delphi 2010, if you press f6, you get IDE insight. This is an incremental search into a context sensitive map of options from where you are. So I have a new project and I want to import some XML - I type in XML I get

Bloody brilliant.

Now I have always argued that there is a problem with the growth of any product, they start off small, easy to master and end up with millions of options.  How does any new developer master the package when they are faced with a wall of options?

Delphi 1 had maybe 50 menu items in total, D2010 has a million.  In the Paradox for Windows days, it had two modes, beginner and advanced and the IDE grew / shrank as you switched between them - this was a really good feature when training people how to use the product.  I used to teach the 5 day Delphi Client Server course, now it would need to be a 20 day course!

This power is great for me, but pitty the newbie!

So this is an excellent attempt at making the "problem domain" smaller for newbies - no routing through menus / ribbons / help / readme's / google.  Now it isn't perfect, like it doesn't tell you what you could have if you were in a different place (like a line below which you get a search all), so some options may be hidden from view if you aren't for instance in the code editor or whatever.

Anyway, hopefully post in a couple of hours / days about the overall D2010 presentation in Manchester and my ruminations.

Installing on my main dev machine whilst still working :-), not ideal or labs condition.
Went to the EMBC product trail downloads - selected RAD studio and clicked.  Downloaded the 16MB installer stub.  Unzipped it and ran the most likely item.

Clicked top button, selected language and off we go.
Picked up e-mail and put in the SN

Looks like I'll need a couple of buttons to install each component I want

Entered, checked that it wasn't going to break my install of InterBase or Firebird
Didn't mess with any of the install directories this time :-)
Lets see if I can stop myself from clicking bottons / ZoneAlarm warnings by accident.

And it ticks along

Zonealarms kicked up and said it wasn't happy with SetACL.exe

Rave Reports installing

Onto the docs:

A little confused by the components to install, when you click on an item, it says install or install all options or omit, but doesn't tell you what the difference is.

Still ticking away

ZoneAlarms seemed to block setACL.exe or something like that.  Not sure if it was the set up, but think so.  Ran Delphi, compiled and got an error, rebooted and it worked fine.

Total time a couple of hours, but I wasn't exactly doing it under lab conditions, may have even been for some lunch at one point.
So install, Done.

Next is to see if I can move my main clients application, BDE, Firebird, Components, JVCL, JCL, WPTools, TMS.....

Image filenames have the timestamps in the name.

As an aside, the Developer Group (UKBug) will have someone from Embarcadero 21st October 2009 in London See www.ukbug.co.uk

So It was over a year since my last post. If you have a look at my website, you'll see a similar dereliction of duty!

Just thought I would update the Mobile Broadband post.

Three 3G Mobile Dongle

I took out an annual subscription to one of these on the 1GB teriff, cheaper if you already are a Three customer.  Works well and when it can't link will attempt to fall back to Orange for GPRS (currently Orange, used to be O2 I think).  Very unreliable on trains or when moving in and out of good reception areas, but means I can go anywhere (camping in Barmouth) and be in emergency contact with work for that all important remote in.

So this next month is going to be really busy for me, but am determined to do get all my to-do's well underway and improve the website and the blog (www.jac2.co.uk).