CodeRage 7 - Dates and Call for Papers Announced

Today the Call for Papers for Code Rage 7 was just announced.  

This is my favorite event every year.

This year the conference will be 2 weeks.  

• CodeRage 7 - The Online Delphi Developer Conference -- November 6-8, 2012
• CodeRage 7 - The Online C++ Developer Conference -- November 13-15, 2012

We typically scheduled a conference room and have my whole team participate in a single room, allowing 

dialog and training for the whole team.

See you at CodeRage

I have never seen so many Delphi Events as we are seeing right now.

There is definitely a buzz regarding the new Delphi XE2

DelphiLive in San Jose has completed and it was a great event.

Half the Delphi World Tour dates have past, with a several more to go.
In Utah the Delphi World Tour represented one of the largest  Delphi Event in Years.

Next Up is CodeRage  Oct 17-21, 2011.    It a FREE, virtual conference.     For those who are confused about the idea of a virtual conference.... think of of it as 50 back to back webinars in 5 Days.  

My team goes to training room with loads of junk food.    Where we discuss the sessions as they occur.      It really for good team building.

I will be sharing 4 sessions at CodeRage this year.

• Learning Magic Tricks: The Beginners Guide to RTTI 
• Learn what RTTI is and how to use it. This session is designed for those that have heard of RTTI, but don't know where to start.
• Practical Magic: Why would I use Delphi RTTI? 
• Attendees are shown several practical examples of how the RTTI in Delphi works.
• Magic Unleashed: A Deep Dive into the Delphi RTTI 
• In this session, we pull back the covers and explore the internals of how RTTI.pas and TypInfo.pas work inside of Delphi exposing all of the RTTI options you have to use in your applications.
• Exploring the Delphi Debugger 
• This session explores how to use the Delphi Debugger to find those difficult to find problems. We explore the little known features of the debugger that can make your life easier when real problems arise.

All of the RTTI sessions are back to back, allowing for Q/A after each.    With three sessions I will be able to provide more information than I have ever been able to do before.

CodeRage - Audio/Recording Equipment

I was just accepted to do two CodeRage Sessions, I am excited about both of them.

• Building Robust Applications with Customized Exception Management
• Continuous Integration with DUnit and FinalBuilder

I hope everyone gets a chance to attend some of the sessions, the exact dates and times of my sessions are not known yet. The conference is scheduled for October 4-8, 2010.

What I used in the past and will still
use to monitor broadcast audio

Right after I graduated from high school, I attended university as a theater major. That lasted about 2 years before dropping out to become a full time Delphi programmer. :-) But my love for Theater is still in my life. I volunteer at our local theater, building sets, running shows, and many other things.  As such, I developed an appreciation for quality sound.

One of the things I observed in my past recordings was my audio quality was not what I wanted it to be.     I also don't have a huge budget to turn my office office into a studio, but I did make some investments to try to improve the quality of the sound.  About $280 later this this is what i have:

The New setup

• A new microphone
• Nady MPF-6 6-Inch Clamp On Microphone Pop Filter
• Samson C01 Large Diaphragm Vocal Condenser Microphone
• On Stage DS7200B Adjustable Desk Microphone Stand, Black
• Samson SP01 Shockmount Spider Mount for Condenser Mics
• A new mixer and headphones
• Behringer Xenyx 802 Premium 8-Input 2-Bus Mixer with Xenyx Mic Preamps and British EQs
• Audio Technica ATHM40FS Precision Studio Headphones
• USB Audio Interface
• Behringer UCA202 U-Control Audio Interface
• And the cables needed to hook it all up.
• Hosa CPR201 Dual 1/4 To Dual RCA Cable 3.25 Ft
• XLR male to XLR female Microphone Cable - 15 feet

I have now done some test recordings, and I really pleased with the quality of my voice.  If I were only doing an audio podcast I would have a near perfect setup. But with a good microphone comes some problems, related to the acoustics of the room,  I now can hear the keyboard, mouse, the squeaky chair, the fan on the computer, and a slight echo.  I also can hear the kids if they are talking in the room next door.  To get the audio in my office where I would want it would be another $400-$700 not something I am going to spend any time soon.

So some tricks I have learned:   A laptop keyboard is much quieter than my desktop keyboard so I most likely will be presenting on it instead of my desktop.   Strategic placement of hung blankets helps with the Echo of room which reduces other noises.    I suspect some WD-40 on the chair will help with the squeak or I will just switch chairs.     If I am recording noise reduction will remove most of the noise from the computer fan.  This but it won't help with the live presentations, so I might pull out the longer cables I have. to isolate the computer, as I still need it even if I am not typing 100% of the time on it.

Overall I hope that future live and recorded sessions of mine will have better audio for everyone.    Even if I am the only one that may notice the difference in the end .

RTTI - Practical Examples

Well it took a lot longer than I wanted to get this code out.

There were many more rough edges than I wanted, but after some gentle and firm requests I realized I needed to get this out before the rough edges are finished.

Specifically the XmlSerial.pas has a road map in source code detailing what I still need to get done.

What is released:

• IniPersist.pas Allows easy mapping of properties and fields to an INI File.


• XmlSerial.pas Object and Record Serialization and De-serialization to XML


• ObjDs.pas Read-only mapping of Objects to TClientDataSets.
  


• RttiUtils.pas Things to help with common RTTI needs.

How to get the code:
Follow the above links to each unit, or just use SVN.

I am now working on some blog posts to show the how to use this code.

CodeRage IV - BDE to DBX

Well I just finished my session on CodeRage IV Session BDE to DBX, and so I am reposting a messsage I posted at the end of DelphiLive with the same information.

My slides and code are available in SVN at my Google Code Site

The BDEtoDBXDataPump was a quick and dirty application but it should work, let
me know if you have a problem and I will update the code in SVN, I had to update it once since DelphiLiver version of this session.

The ComponentConverter will convert TQuery and TTable to TdbxQuery components.
It will also convert TDatabase to TSqlConnection, and few other things to help in the conversion, such as removing the BDE Units and adding in the DBX units.

The ComponentCoverter contains a few little gems such as a DFM Parser.

CodeRage Sessions

Although, I just posted a fairly big teaser of my RTTI session, I neglected the other sessions I will be covering at CodeRage.

• Building and Consuming Web Services in Delphi and Delphi Prism

This is a introduction to the topic, if you have done web services you won't learn anything new :-)

• Building Unit Tests with DUnit

This is a introduction to the topic, I will be covering the XML test runner and other features that not visible on the surface. So it may be useful even if you use basic DUnit Tests.
• Converting from BDE to DBX

This is a refined version of my DelphiLive material. This has been my most popular session I have ever given, I have recieved more feedback on this than any other. It does not hurt that Andreano Lanusse repeated parts of the session on his various stops in Brazil I will be showing the DBX framework and some code/dfm parsers that do much of the work to convert a BDE application to DBX. I will also show a BDE to DBX datapump.

• Practical Application of RTTI and Attributes

I have never been more exicited about a feature in Delphi. After seeing this session and the associated blog posts, I hope you realize what I am talking about :-)

I hope to be able to chat with many of you next week at CodeRage.

Delphi 2010 - RTTI & Attributes

So what is RTTI? RTTI is an acronym for Run Time Type Information. It allows you interact with the type system at Run Time. I like to compare RTTI to meta data information stored in a database. If I execute the following SQL statement "select * from employee" how does the database know what to return? How does the application know what will be returned? It all boils down to "MetaData Information" which allows you to look up what database fields and there associated types will be returned. With RTTI, you have this same access to types defined in your Delphi code.

Delphi has always had RTTI, but Delphi 2010 has taken RTTI to the next level.

CodeRage is next week, there are two session that will be covering the RTTI system in Delphi 2010.

The first is Barry Kelly's presentation on "Delphi Compiler RTTI Enhancements" if you have time to only see one, then see this one. Barry is the engineer behind the Compiler RTTI Enhancements. His presentation is currently scheduled for Tuesday.

The second, is mine on "Practical Application of RTTI and Attributes" my presentation is currently scheduled for Thursday.

Both are only 40 minutes long, it is enough to get your tips of your toes wet, and I want to jump right in :-)

As such I have prepared a series of blog posts, I will start posting these after my CodeRage Session. Most likely one each day. Although, I tend to hate teasers, I decided to post one :-P

Here is what to expect:

1. Delphi 2010 RTTI - The basics


2. Using Attributes and TCustomAttribute descendants


3. Exploring TRTTIType in depth


4. Introduction to TValue


5. Exploring TRttiMember Descendants in depth (Part I) Properties and Fields


6. Why I call TRttiContext.Create() and TRttiContext.Free()


7. Exploring TRttiMember Descendants in depth (Part II) Methods


8. TValue in Depth


9. INI persistence the RTTI way


10. Xml Serialization - Basic Usage


11. Xml Serialization - Control via Attributes


12. Attributes: Practical Example- Object to Client Dataset


13. Types by Package... Dynamic plug-in systems.

The above list may change a bit as I am still editing the material.

I will update this post with links to the blog posts, as the become available if you want to bookmark this page.

I hope to see you at CodeRage, to unleash the Chaos :-)

CodeRage sessions, ask your questions now.

I have been working on my sessions for CodeRage. I have four sessions this time. I would like to solicit "pre-session" questions on three of my sessions. It's your chance to shape the material that is presented.

Do you have any questions on the topics below?
If so let me know via either a comment to this blog post or an email rlove at peakbiz.com

• Converting from BDE to DBX
  Learn how to convert your existing BDE applications to the DBX Architecture. We will cover the architectural and coding differences between BDE and DBX. We will then cover tools that freely available to assist you in this conversion.
  Note: This session is similar to the material I presented at DelphiLive and by Andreano Lanusse in Brazil, so if you attended one of these sessions and have feedback, I would be glad to hear it.


• Building and Consuming Web Services in Delphi and Delphi Prism
  Walk step by step through the process to build and consume web services, with both Delphi Win32 and Prism.


• Building Unit Tests with DUnit
  Get up to speed with unit testing in DUnit. No prior knowledge of Unit testing or DUnit is required.
  Note: If you have tried DUnit and did not understand it, I want to hear from you!
  

I need the questions by August 13th, as I need to record these sessions before I leave for a back-packing trip to the top of Mt. Whitney