W32/Induc-A are you worried?

Over the last few days there have been a flurry of posts about this virus. I’m not going to repeat what it is or what it does, as I’m sure any self respecting Delphi developer has read the same posts that I have.

Are Embarcadero worried about this development? If not, they should be! (To be fair, they are aware of it, and thinking about it)

It’s all well and good telling us that

1. It only affects Delphi 4-7, so get the latest version!
2. It is a rather benign virus, and doesn’t cause any harm, so don’t worry unduly.

Unfortunately the cat is out of the bag, and you can’t put it back. I think (and somebody correct me if I’m wrong), there is nothing in the current version of Delphi that prevents this being replicated for later versions. My guess is the virus writer is one of those who hasn’t upgraded, and it’s only a matter of time before someone replicates this for Delphi 2009. Secondly, who knows what the next virus might do? This maybe just a warning, the next one may cause untold havoc.

How long before clients start asking what tool we use for our development, and refusing to buy applications written in Delphi. I need to be able to tell clients that this cannot happen with the tool we currently use. Is that even possible?

Time for new project type?

I’m not a web developer. While I did do some classic ASP earlier in my career, it’s mostly been about classic (Delphi) Win32 applications for me. So recently I thought I’d have a look at ASP.NET. At the same time, I thought I’d also have a look at ASP.NET MVC since that seems to be the in thing at the moment. Now I have no bias either way. I’m fairly new to both, but I just loved the simplicity of ASP.NET MVC. I’m not sure if simplicity is the word I need here, because actually, classic ASP.NET is perhaps the easier option for an inexperienced developer, as it uses abstractions to make Web development a drag and drop affair. Still, ASP.NET MVC just felt more natural to me. I’m sure had I looked at it 10-12 years ago (and had ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC been around), I would have loved ASP.NET, and wondered why they even bothered with MVC.

This got me thinking about my day job. Since Delphi 1 we’ve opened up the IDE and clicked on New VCL Forms Application, got our empty form and started dropping components on the surface. We drop a few more components, create a few bindings, write a few event handlers, and hey presto we have an application. I bet every Delphi developer started out that way, and it works, but as you get more experienced, you begin to realise that for any real-world, half decent application, this sort of coding style just doesn’t scale well, and more importantly doesn’t maintain well. So you add a datamodule, and move all your database components to it, and feel happy for all of about 3 minutes. Something still bothers you though, so you get rid of the datamodules, and get rid of the data aware components, and perhaps write a framework, or even get a third party one. You read the book on design patterns, and see how many of them you can fit into your application.

Now that’s all well and good, and your framework may be great, but it’s different than my framework. Actually, I keep changing my framework of choice depending on what article or book I read last. My point is, that there is no consistency. So while the data-aware component model works well for beginners, and I would not advocate getting rid of it, I think Delphi is more than mature enough to have a new model. Sure we can look at third-party vendors for this model, or we can write it ourselves, but if we want real consistency, it needs to be in the IDE right next to Create New VCL Forms Application, and everybody needs to have it in their IDE. That way, when that new developer outgrows the 100 components per form model, and he or she is ready for the next level, there’s a clear path.

So how about it Embarcadero? Perhaps it’s time for Delphi to grow up a bit. I dunno, some kind of MVC pattern perhaps. Perhaps Passive View. Why not more than one? Wouldn’t you like to see this in the menu under File|New

New Passive View Project

Or maybe it’s just me!

Now I’m excited!

I’ve just read about attributes and RTTI in Delphi 2010. As someone who has used RTTI extensively and looked at reflection in .NET enviously, I can say I’m really looking forward to playing with the new RTTI model.

As for attributes, I’m sure a whole new array of interesting ways of doing certain things is going to be possible. There are currently lots of tools and frameworks which use RTTI to do certain things. Up until now, one of the main drawbacks to this was you could only work on published properties and methods.

One example that comes to mind is a small tool supplied with a third party component that prepares Delphi components and classes for use in a scripting solution. This tool works great, and parses classes to produce the boiler plate code needed for setting up the runtime environment for scripting. Unfortunately, it can only work on published properties and methods. If you want to expose any public properties, you have to do it manually.

These kind of things excite me more than IDE enhancements or ribbon controls. Having said that, I hope the IDE keeps up with these new compiler innovations. Does code completion still work with custom attributes for example?

Productivity versus Excitement

Many of the commentators in my two recent posts pointed out that the IDE additions and fixes in the forthcoming Delphi 2010 will increase productivity. I have no doubt about that. There’s one in particular I can see saving me quite a bit of time, and that’s the uses units. I use that little tool all the time, and could never understand why it automatically always put the unit in the implementation’s uses clause by default. Why can’t I choose? Well apparently now I can.

One particular comment went on to say that compiler changes, the thing I said might just excite me, could in fact decrease productivity. It takes time to learn new stuff, and if you are spending more time learning, than actually doing things, then you’d not getting things done.

That got me thinking about the Microsoft world, and how it seems that you hardly have started looking at one new technology, before it’s superseded by another. You’ve just about got your head around Winforms, and they spring WPF on you, then you jump on to that bandwagon, and suddenly it’s Silverlight out of the browser that’s the new in thing. Oh wait a minute, WPF and Silverlight doesn’t seem to be doing so good, perhaps we should stick with Winforms. Same on the web development side of things. You start with ASP.NET, get comfortable with ViewState and postbacks, and bam, they bring out ASP.NET MVC and tell you to forget all that (Actually they say they’re keeping both, so you need to decide which is for you). To make things worse, they offer you Silverlight as well. It’s the same wherever you look. Linq to SQL? Well apparently Microsoft now prefer Entity Framework. Well they did. I’m not quite sure anymore.

So yeah, all these new innovations to the language and new technologies do have an effect on your productivity, especially if you are trying them all out. The thing is, it’s human nature to want something new and shiny. Look at mobile phones. Most people use their mobile phones for making and receiving calls and that’s it. Oh, they might try a few of the new features when they first get the phone. Maybe take the occasional photo with their phone, but for the most part, they just make calls. So why do they change their phone every 6 months or so? The phone they had 5 years ago still works great for making those calls. The phone manufactures know it’s human nature to always want the new model. So they oblige and keep churning them out.

Microsoft also know that they can’t just rest on what they’ve got. They’ve got to keep their audience excited. Keep throwing as much new exciting stuff as is possible to keep them coming back for more. So while I agree, I’m as productive as a Microsoft developer who is using C# and Visual Studio, I admit I do go green with envy when that get some new toy!

Delphi Love

I was rather surprised at the comments to my last post. Some were pretty heated. Delphi developers are extremely protective of their baby, but I knew that already. I didn’t actually think my post was that provocative, but perhaps it was.

A good number commented that what has been released so far is only the tip of the iceberg, and that beta testers were not allowed to reveal more yet. That’s all well and good, but I can only comment on what I have seen. When more is revealed, I no doubt will add further comments.

Actually, I never said 2010 sucks. I just said that I’m not that excited yet. I didn’t say others wouldn’t be excited. I just said that I, personally, in my humble opinion, need more than IDE changes to get my blood stirring.

Each release of Delphi Prism excites me for example. They seem to be forever adding little goodies to the compiler. Perhaps it’s easier to do with the .NET platform?

Delphi 2010

I know I’m supposed to get excited and all that, but I’m not. Improvements to the IDE, no matter how useful or needed just don’t do it for me. I guess it’s analogous to an accountant getting excited at improvements to his favourite calculator. (although I guess accountancy is so boring that a few new buttons on a calculator might just warm an accountant’s cockles!)

I get excited at real innovation. Improvements to the language for example. Ability to do things with my preferred language that’s either impossible or difficult to do with any other language. Innovation to the underlying Compiler etc etc

I guess I’ll have to wait until Delphi 2011 comes out.