Zugg Software :: View Entry - CodeRage II online conference for Delphi this week

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 6:15 pm

It's been a while since I made a blog post. I've just been really busy with the CMUD 2.x beta.

But this week is the second online virtual CodeRage conference from CodeGears, the people who make the Delphi development system that all Zuggsoft products are written in. Originally this conference was going to have a charge (but free for people who had purchased Delphi 2007 last year). But they changed it at the last minute to be a free conference for anyone.

Last April I wrote about the First CodeRage conference. So here, I'll try to post anything interesting that is announced in the new conference.

So far, there are fewer technical difficulties. Although I was only able to connect via their Java-based Interwise client and not using the native Win32 Interwise client. But at least I can listen/view the sessions.

So far, the most exciting news is that another new version of Delphi is planned for mid-2008. This new version of Delphi will be fully UNICODE compatible! In the past they have claimed that the Delphi VCL would never be rewritten to be fully Unicode compliant. Well, I guess they finally changed their mind and realized that the emerging markets really *require* full Unicode support.

I'm sure it will take a while to get this all working, and of course 3rd party components such as Developer Express will also need to be updated. So I don't expect to use this right away. But at least it's a good direction for the future. This should help a lot in making CMUD more Unicode compliant in the future (but probably not until 2009 when it's all stable and all 3rd party stuff has been updated).

Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2007 9:08 pm

Someone was asking for an update on CodeRage II:

Not nearly as interesting as last April. As usual, Marco Cantù's presentations were some of the best. A good session on using Delphi BPL packages to create a dynamic plugin architecture (rather than DLLs) that was interesting. Not sure I use it because I want people to be able to create plugins in other languages, but still interesting. He also had a good talk about Delphi 2007 on Vista.

Nothing about PHP for Delphi this time around, although they mentioned a new version in 2008 that will have better HTML support, so maybe it will be able to do basic page layout then. Not sure I'll bother with upgrading to it unless it gets really great reviews...I was burned by the first product being so useless for real-life web development.

The had several talks on their new "3rdRail" product, which is their Ruby IDE. I didn't listen to those talks because I'm not that interested in Ruby, but I love the product name ("3rdRail"...the rail with all the power ;) But I have no idea what the product does or how good it is (or isn't).

Part of the problem is that they released the full RAD Studio version of Delphi 2007 a couple of months ago, which adds all of the .NET support to Delphi 2007. Last April, in the first CodeRage, they were only talking about the Win32 version of Delphi 2007, which is the only product I am interested in. This time in CodeRage II they had a lot more .NET talks, which bore me to tears.

Of course, the few talks that I was interested in were always the earliest talks in the morning. So I still had to get up at 7am most everyday this week (I'm a "night person", so I hate getting up that early). At least I was still able to do CMUD programming in the afternoons, although I'm *really* tired right now from the lack of sleep.

Probably the best thing to come out of CodeRage II is that I learned about Marco Cantù's new Delphi 2007 book (self published via Lulu.com) and look forward to reading it when it arrives. Instead of creating yet another monstrous tome like his "Mastering Delphi" series, he has just put the changes from Delphi 7 to Delphi 2007 in his book, so it should be a good read. And learning about the Lulu.com publishing site has got me thinking about some future possibilities for a printed "Playing MUDs using CMUD" book (in my copious spare time ;)