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The Many Faces of Delphi

Question for you:

Q: What do Delphi, Kylix, Object Pascal, Free Pascal, Chrome and Oxygene all have in common?

A: They all count towards Delphi’s score on the TIOBE index when you follow them by the word Programming!

I remember when the Delphi IDE used the Object Pascal Programming language, then it changed to the Delphi Programming Language.  After the DevCo broke off from Borland it was referred to as both.  But as far as TPCI (TIOBE Programming Community Index) is concerned, you can call it what you like, as long as you say Programming after it.

Noticably missing:

Soon to come:

And TCPI counts seperately:

I was looking at the grouping and exceptions list at the bottom of the TCPI Definition last night and was surprised at the size of the Delphi group.  I’ve already contacted them about adding Delphi for .NET.  Once Prism is actually announced, then we can get it added too.

A number of bloggers (Gabr, Allen and Malcolm to name a few) have already updated their templates to include Delphi programming on every page of their blog.  That is a great way to make sure your existing Delphi content is counted towards the index.  I am not suggesting we game the system, just that we help TCPI get an accurate count.

As Olaf Monien pointed out, there are a lot of sites with a lot of room for improvement: CodeGear.com being one of them!  In addition to his great list, check out the following:

How does your site measure up?  Update your Delphi related blog or site to say Delphi programming on every page in visible text (update the template).  Stand up and be counted.  You can make a difference!

Once you have updated your site, contact authors of other sites and encourage them to do the same!

UPDATE: Is the TPCI relevant?  There are 12,900 hits in Google where people have refernced them, and an Alexa traffic rank of: 111,776. (Thanks RIF)

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Audio podCast

9 – CodeRage 3 and Delphi Prism

The reason for this special edition is there has been some big news lately and I wanted to go straight to the source to get you the facts on what is going on as soon as possible.

I tracked down Anders Ohlsson and Christine Ellis of Developer Relations at Embarcadero CodeGear to get the facts on CodeRage 3, an upcoming physical conference and the elusive Delphi Prism.  We also discuss plans for a Delphi flash mob at the PDC Open Spaces.

Delphi Twitters at PDC

Post a comment if you will be at PDC and include your Twitter page if you have one.

I will be at CodeRage and PDC.  See you there!

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News

Delphi Keeps Climbing

Last month Delphi was back in the top 10 for the TIOBE Programming Community Index for September. Well the numbers for October are out, and Delphi has kept on moving to position #9.  It bumped JavaScript.

I truly believe we are in the Delphi Renaissance.

The way the TIOBE Index works is it looks for the phrase “Delphi programming” in various searches.  Then compares the numbers for all the languages it indexes.  So be sure you say “Delphi programming” in your pages that are talking about Delphi, instead of some shorthand that doesn’t meet that search criteria.

That is why I have Delphi programming in my subtitle here.  Then I know it is on every page.

Call to Action

  1. Update your blog or web site to say “Delphi programming” on every page.
  2. Contact the authors of other Delphi blogs to remind them to do the same.
  3. Include the phrase Delphi programming in forum posts you might make.
  4. Contact people behind other Delphi related web sites and remind them to do the same.

Together we can take #8 in November! (And in the US you thought November was just about the presidential election!)

Update: If you update your site or blog to say “Delphi programming” on every page, leave a link here, and add a comment to your blog so others will see it and do the same.  If you look, C# is in number 8, and it wasn’t that long ago that Delphi was ahead of C#.

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News

Code Rage III: Call for Speakers

As was mentioned in this week’s Podcast, CodeRage III is coming.

Anders is currently looking for speakers.

As Anders mentioned, this is not to replace a face-to-face conference, but is only until a physical conference is scheduled.  I planning on submitting a few sessions.  I’ll see you all in the chat rooms!

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News

Craig Peterson’s favorite blog links

Back in Episode 7 I neglected to publish the links to the favorite blogs of Scooter Software‘s Craig Peterson.  Here they are for anyone who didn’t find them.  Most of these are favorites of mine too:

I am sure Craig also frequents the Beyond Compare forums too, which have their own RSS feed.

If you still have not taken advantage of that 25% discount code on Beyond Compare 3, please listen to Episode 7 again, and get the code, or just upgrade without the code.  Seriously, Beyond Compare is one of my favorite tools, and it is Jeff Atwood’s too.

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News

Free Delphi 2009 Handbook by Marco Cantu

Hopefully you all just got an email from Michael Swindell with the subject line “Product Update: Delphi and C++Builder Changes.”  The email address it comes from is “CodeGear from Embarcadero” <e-update@email.codegear.com>.  If not, then check your spam folders and furiously refresh your in-box until it shows up.

The email is a request to update your contact information (which seems like an odd request since they obviously have my email address), although I think it is just a matter of getting us to agree to a privacy policy / terms of use with the new company. I’m happy to maintain contact with CodeGear & Embarcadero, but the carrot they offer in return is a free PDF copy of Marco Cantu‘s yet to be released Delphi 2009 Handbook.

They will email the download link later.  I can hardly wait.  Now I just need to get an autographed hard copy.  I’ll be sure to pack a copy when I go to the physical Delphi conference CodeGear is planning.

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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!

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News

Audio Quality

As a new podcast creator audio quality is a big deal to me.  In this last podcast I tried a few things differently to get better audio quality.  In my opinion it is a lot better, but the voice levels are uneven now – with me a lot quieter now.  The odd thing is my headphones I use when editing actually made it sound like they were equal.  Now when I am listening to it at my headphones at work it is obvious that they are unequal.  I wouldn’t have expected the two pairs of headphones to be that different.

I am curious how it sounds to everyone else?  Is it better?  Are the voices equal volume for you?  Do you care?

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Audio podCast

7 – Beyond Compare

Craig Peterson - Lead Developer for Beyond CompareThis week is an interview with Craig Peterson, the Lead Developer on Scooter Software’s Beyond Compare, one of my favorite utilities.  We discuss deveoping on the Linux platform with Kylix, adding Unicode Support pre-Delphi 2009, the new version of Beyond Compare and some tips for using it, plus a whole lot more.

Be sure to listen to the podcast to get your 25% discount code on Beyond compare version 3.  Also still good is the RemObjects 20% discount code.  Both are valid through the end of October!

Categories
News Video podCast

Intro to Generic Collections with Delphi 2009

A very short introduction to Generic Collections in Delphi 2009. Create a TList of Integers and show adding and removing items from it. Showing some of the differences in types, gotchas and errors you might get.

Generics, or parametrized types, are a type that works with another type that is defined later. Collections are a great example of using them. You create a generic TList, and then when you use it you declare what type it will contain. Then it will be strongly typed to that specific type, both in adding items and removing them.

Delphi Generics work with all types in Delphi: native types (Integer, string, etc.), Records, Objects and Interfaces.

This is screen cast episode 2, shot with Camtasia and hosted on Vimeo.  I had to shoot it at 1280×720 so they will offer it in HD and not downscale it.  Let me know how it works for everyone.

As was pointed out in the comments, the download link only works after you sign into Vimeo.  If that doesn’t work for people let me know and I will come up with a different solution.