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.

FinalBuilder Server replacement Continua CI

For quite some time VSoft Technologies the makers of FinalBuilder have been working on a replacement for FinalBuilder Server, that they had called FindBuilder Server vNext +1.    They just announced a public beta of this new product called Continua CI.

I have played with this software and if your build is not automated it's required to take a look.   If your build is automated it worth taking a look.  For those who have used FinalBuilder Server it will take you by surprise as they are really not alike.    But many things that I had to build special scripts to do with FinalBuilder server are now just taken care of for you.

For example:

• Multiple Stages - where I could have 1 or more build stages, followed by 1 or more unit testing stages, an installation building stage,  and a deployment stage.
• Can handle customized build numbers derived from version control values such as a SVN revision ID.
• Linking of the items in the our bug tracking database.
• Handling building of Branches in our SVN Repo

The basic architecture of FinalBuilder Server required a dependency on the FinalBuilder desktop product and typically builds would run on a single server.   With Continua CI you now have a server that does nothing more than provide the web interface, and store information about the builds and trigger agents to do the build.    The server and agent can be on the same machine if desired or you could have multiple agents configured with different stages of your build running on each.  

Where I work we have a 25 minute build, test, deploy process that occurs with each commit.    As we look at Continua CI we are rethinking our current build process to span multiple machines with the goal to get this down to the 5-10 minute range, something I think is very possible with this product without a huge effort.

Feel free to read the documentation on the product to get a better understanding of what it offers.  Remember that the product is in beta so the documentation is still a work in process, but it's more than enough to get you going.

But the biggest news that they announced was how it was licensed.   

Out of the box, Free of charge, Continua supports :

Unlimited Users

Unlimited Projects

Unlimited Configurations

1 Local Agent(on the same machine as the server)

1 Concurrent Build. 

After that you can purchase concurrent build licenses. Once you have at least 1 license installed, you can use as many remote agents as you like, agents do not take up licenses, concurrent builds do.

If we use Continua the way we used FinalBuilder Server before it will now cost us $0.  Granted we current have user 12 licenses that we have maintenance on,  so they will convert to 6 concurrent builds licenses.   

Which may be more than we need but I suspect we could use at least 4 and if other teams here use it then we might need quite a few more.

The pricing is right to try, it was fairly easy to setup, and get a CI server going.

Embarcadero - Clang and LLVM

Recently Tim Anderson reported that Embarcadero was going to be using the Clang Compiler in the Rad Studio.   When word broke about Embarcadero using LLVM with Delphi I was quite pleased.   I had been playing around with LLVM learning its IR for quite some time and it is a great tool for most any development language.    However, knowing that they have based there C++ work on the the Clang Compiler is very pleasing to me.    Clang is a very nice C/C++/Objective-C Compiler.

Benefits of the Clang Compiler  

• Complete support for C++98 and nearly complete support for C++11 Standards
• Good platform for building Source Level Tools 
• The Default Compiler in XCode on Mac OS X
• Can compile FreeBSD and is the Default Compiler
• Can compile the Boost C++ Libraries
• It can be easily embedded into any application as it designed to be a library
• The API is built with tooling and IDE integration in mind.
• Good Error Messages
• Better performance that GCC
• Use of the LLVM Core libraries (The Compiler back-end) 

Some of the Benefits of LLVM (I really don't do it justice with my small list)

• Target-Independent Code Generator with production level support for the following processors.  (Although not all features are supported on each processor)
• X86
• ARM
• Sparc
• PowerPC
• Hexagon
• Mips
• JIT Support with an optional command line tool  (lli) to run LLVM bitcode
• Optimizer has many Optimizations with a plug-able infrastructure to add additional optimization's
• Optional Support for implementing Garbage Collection
• Good set of Tools
• It well documented.

All of this makes me wonder how much of other things from LLVM that they may end up using all or part of  as  LLDB, KLEE, or VMKit

Now which features of clang and llvm will be exposed in the Embarcadero tool chain is not know yet.   But it's nice to know that there is a good foundation they are building on.    

I guess it might be time to sign up for Priority Preview Access to see this in action.

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.

XE2 and Registration Headaches.

Today I hit the registration limit on XE2.

I installed it on the following machines.

1. Laptop (Primary for DelphiLive Presentation)
2. Laptop (Backup for DelphiLive Presentation)
3. Desktop (Home)
4. MacMini, Windows VM
5. Desktop  (Work)

Registered in in that order.   I ran in to the registration Limit with #5.    I am the only person who uses these machines.

So I think no big deal, I will request a registration limit increase.    I requested the increase and walked away from my machine for meeting.     Thinking I can wait 14 days to register no big deal.

Then I did the following.

1. File|New VCL Application

2. Ctrl-F9

Then the following dialog appears.

I have never been a fan of activation, but I have not been against it... Until Now!

Now that I can see that the 14 day grace does not just cripple the application on start-up, it annoys the developer and reduces their productivity.

The good news is that support did respond and the activation limit has been increased.     But this is just a headache that paying customers should not have to deal with.    

   

New Mac and Rad Studio XE2

Note: I was given permission to blog about the Rad Studio XE2 Beta.

Today my first Mac OSX computer arrived at my home.   I have only used a Mac when working
on Sound and Lights at local theatre.   I have spent about 10 hours total time working on a Mac in the last 10 years. So I would guess this as close to a new user experience as one my expect.

The primary reason I bought the Mac is because Rad Studio XE2 supports writing applications for this platform.    I like to make sure I stay on top of the various Delphi technologies so I had to buy one.

I opened the box and hooked up the various cables.    Turned it on and I saw a little diagram asking me to turn on my touch pad or mouse.   Well I turned on the touch pad and nothing happened.   After trying various combinations I gave up and called support.   After having to power of the Mac twice we were able to get the wireless keyboard and mouse to work.      Things were not going well, and I was a bit worried I had made a mistake but things turned around.

I had installed the latest Rad Studio XE2 Beta version on my home computer, which is a Windows 7 machine.  
Then I performed the following steps:
1. File|New Firemonkey HD Application.
2. I then right Clicked on Target platform and added OSx

I knew I had to install something on the Mac but I did not know where it was or how to do it.
I opened the Help file and found it had a Huge amount of information that pointed me in the right direction.
From the little I did read I was very very pleased with the depth of coverage.

3. I Installed the Platform Assistant on the Mac according to the instructions.
4. I launched the platform assistant clicking on the "paserver.command" in
"Developer" section of finder.

5. Then in back in Delphi, I right clicked on the "OS X" Target Platform and selected "Assign Remote Profile"
6. On the "Select Remote Profile for 'OS X' Platform" dialog I pressed "Add..."
7. I walked through the Wizard and Added Information about my Mac.

8.  Then finally I selected the new profile that was created.
9.  I then pressed the run button.

The application appeared on the Mac as expected.

I must say the out of the box experience with Delphi and the Mac looks very polished, it was very easy to setup.  I spent more time trying to get the wireless mouse and keyboard to work than getting Rad Studio configured and my first App running.

Now that I have a basic app running it's time to really explore how FireMonkey integrates will both Windows and OS X.

For more information check out the Rad Studio XE World Tour or the Delphi Live conference.

THtmlWriter - First Look

I wanted my build process to automatically generate a web page with what was changed in the given build.   Basically I had to query our Internal Bug Tracking system and produce a web page. Allowing me to take a

snapshot of bug tracking system as it looked liked when the build was produced.

This was going to be a simple console application that our build could run.  

So I decided to try THtmlWriter written by Nick Hodges.

I spent more time reviewing the code of THtmlWriter than I did actually using it.

It was very easy to use, and will most likely use it in future

If you need to produce HTML from Delphi application it's worth looking at this.

So here is my +1 Vote for THtmlWriter