Categories
Audio podCast

8 – Round Table on Best Practices

This is another one of our exciting round table discussions.  This time around we discuss Conferences – Including up coming CodeGear conferences, Best Practices, Newsgroups and Forums, Generics, Exception handling, Source Control, the MVC Pattern as it relates to Delphi and great Delphi extensions.

Anders Ohlsson with Developer Relations at Embarcadero Technologies.  Anders is involved in the CodeGear conferences including CodeRage and the previous DevCons.  Additionally he travels the world meeting with Delphi developer groups showing off the latest features of Delphi.  His blog is the Hacker’s Corner.

Roland Beenhakker is a long time Delphi user since version 1. He started his own company Beensoft Software Engineering. In this company a small team of professionals build software and webapplications to customer’s specifications, using Delphi and other tools. He is located in Heiloo, Netherlands, which is about 40 kilometers north of Amsterdam. His blog is Delphi Power Unleashed.

Jolyon Smith has been using Delphi since literally before it was released, as he has access to the Borland Early Experience Program through his employer at the time. Before that he was developing client/server Windows applications before it became fashionable, primarily using Gupta SQLWindows and SQLBase. Apart from software development, he is a rabid movie geek, a devoted family man, a voracious reader and an enthusiastic singer. He lives in Aukland, New Zealand and his blog is Te Waka o Delphi.

marc hoffman is the Chief Software Architect for RemObjects and a Spare-time Photographer. When he is not guest appearing on this podcast he runs a blog at RemObjects.com where he talks about Oxygene and shares some of his photographs. marc lives in Berlin Germany, and prefers his name all lowercase.

Be sure to take advantage of the 20% off of anything and everything RemObject sells with the discount code in the podcast.  Also get 25% off BeyondCompare 3 from Scooter Software.  The discount codes are in the podcast and good through the end of October.

Some episode links and notes.  Add more in the comments!

14 replies on “8 – Round Table on Best Practices”

75 minutes??? So much for preferred podcast length… 😉
That summary sure looks promising, though. Looking forward to listening to this one on the way back home! 🙂

BTW: Have you considered asking Andreas Hausladen to be on the show?

The speed of your server seems to be pretty low (I just get ~30-40 kb/s with a 18 MBit line). Have you considered putting more efficient formats like Ogg Vorbis (as an option) online to decrease the file size?

Looking forwards to listen it once it downloaded 🙂

The “Cancel Kibitz compiler” feature was a feature of DelphiSpeedUp that has now moved to the DDevExtensions for 2009 because there is no DelphiSpeedUp for Delphi 2009. This means that if you install DelphiSpeedUp into Delphi 5..2007 you’ll have that feature.

Most of the features of the “unit expert” by EPocalipse (mentioned in the podcast) have been integrated into GExperts. The code was donated to GExperts a few years ago and GExperts used some of it and rewrote other parts of it. The feature is accessed via GExperts, Editor Experts, Uses Clause Manager. It allows searching for and adding any unit to the uses clause of the current unit without losing your place in the source code (see the Quick Add mode checkbox for the fastest route), moving a units between the interface/implementation, etc.

There is also a related “Open File” tool that allows quickly opening any source unit in your path/project, in the VCL/RTL directories, recent units, etc. by typing in a substring of the unit name.

@Daniel: Ogg isn’t widely supported on portable media players – it’s pretty much only MP3 and AAC that fits that criteria, and MP3 is supported on far more devices than AAC. A VBR file could probably help quite a bit: after all, most of the podcast is speech, and you can compress that more without a noticable loss in quality. I suspect that it’s possible to reduce file sizes by about 40%.

I’d like to advocate using version control, even for your own personal hobby projects where no one but you will ever see the source code. I’ve got a Subversion repository set up on my home PC, and I wouldn’t want to be without it ever again. As long as you’re willing to spend a tiny bit of effort to write good edit summaries and commit your code at suitable times, you’ll be much more capable to figure out what you might have changed that caused some bug to appear. The built-in diff viewer in Delphi/RAD Studio isn’t nearly as good.

@Michael: I agree with you completely. Delphi’s built in revision history is a nice step in that direction though. I’ve used local revision tracking for Word documents too. Word tries to do that in a single file, but it can still get that single file corrupted and you loose them all.

After I made that comment in the podcast I realized that I might give the impression that I didn’t advocate version control on single developer projects, and that isn’t the case.

@Jim: I had a feeling you felt the same way, but if you’d been more clear about that point, I’d still have posted it – just reworded slightly 😉

Comments are closed.