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The Year of the FireMonkey

Year of the FireMonkey

Today is the Lunar New Year starting the Chinese year of the Fire Monkey. The first day of the New Year falls on the new moon between 21 January and 20 February, which in 2016 is Monday, February 8th. The animal associated with the year is cyclical, as is the elemental sign. The last year of the monkey was 2004, and that year it was the Wood Monkey. The Fire elemental sign is considered the prosperity stage.

How are you using FireMonkey this year? How will the Monkey help you prosper?

Even Google is in on the Fire Monkey action with their Google Doodle of the day:

Google Doodle for the Lunar New Year 2016

Year of the FireMonkey Octagon is by Jim McKeeth and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (derived from Monkey-2 by Angelus). Google Doodle is by Google.
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10 Reasons to Use PAServer for Remote Windows Deployment

Everyone knows PAServer (Platform Assist Server) is the easy way to deploy and debug multi device apps from Windows to Apple OS X and iOS. It handles all the bundling and deployment from your Windows development platform across the network, via a virtual machine, or even to the cloud.

Previously I showed you how to connect to a Android Emulator on another machine (or outside your VM), but did you know you can also use the PAServer to deploy and debug against a remote Windows machine? It isn’t required, so isn’t as immediately obvious, but it is supported and pretty easy to setup.

If you are already developing on a Windows machine, why us PAServer to test against a remote Windows machine? There are a lot of reasons, here are a few . . .

  1. Testing on machine without IDE installed
  2. Windows tablets
  3. Different CPU architectures (64-bit vs 32-bit)
  4. Different numbers of cores
  5. Utilizing specialized hardware
  6. Running outside / inside a virtual machine
  7. Deployment on a server (remote, local, in the cloud)
  8. Debugging on more than one version of Windows
  9. Debugging issue that only occurs on one machine
  10. Bundled deployment options

Now that we see the need, how do we do it?

Install PAServer on the target Windows computer. You can find it at C:\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\Studio\17.0\PAServer if you used the default install location during your original install. When installing PAServer, you either need to use a different install location (to a user writable folder), or specify a custom scratch-directory, as the default is not writable (unless you run PAServer as Administrator) and will give you an E0009 PAClient Error. Once PAServer is setup just run it.

Custom PAServer Install Destination

Use the Connection Profile Manager to create a new Windows profile.

RAD Studio Connection Profile Manager

Instead of the default of OS X, choose either Windows 32-bit or 64-bit. The rest of the configuration is the same.

Create Windows 64-bit Profile Connection

Then form the Project Manager, right-click on the Windows platform you want to deploy remotely, and select properties.

Project Manager - Platform Properties

And then select the new connection you want.

Platform Properties - Select Profile

This works with any project type (FireMonkey, VCL, Console, etc.)

Profile Selected

Now you can also use the Deployment Manager for Windows apps as well.