Thursday, April 27, 2017

Some Quick Delphi Opinions

A few quick bits of opinion, and a question for my readers:


1.  Be it resolved that third party tool companies that offer fantastic support are an essential part of any small shop (that uses Delphi or otherwise).  Be it resolved that RemObjects is about as awesome in the support department as it gets.    I've been a fan of DataAbstract and the RemObjects remoting SDK, for Delphi and for .NET, for a long time.   Recently I was trying to upgrade an old project to use the latest version of RemObjects DataAbstract.  The "remobjects connect" site where you get support is fantastic.  Unlike a lot of places, you get answers (and if there's a bug, fixes) really really fast.  Shout out to Marc Hoffman and the other excellent people at RemObjects here.  You guys are great.

2. It is essential to modern development to have a second editor, or two or three.  The more editors you know, the better, up to the point of diminishing returns, which is about six editors, as far as I can see.  I actually regularly use three editors even when working with a powerful IDE like Visual Studio or Delphi. There are things I can do with Notepad++ that I haven't learned to do with anything else. And for searching code, I just love Visual Studio Code, and it has a great Pascal plugin.    And there are things I can do with VIM that other editors just can't do.   If you haven't messed around with Visual Studio Code yet, please please download it and try it. You'll thank me.  And if you're bored some day when you should be coding, try learning VIM. You'll accidentally become more productive, especially when you need to large or very precise edits across a large set of files.  Agree with me here? Disagree? Discuss.

3. Question for readers: Have you tried Delphi 10.2 tokyo on Linux yet? I'm planning to try that out soon.  Will probably write about what I figure out when I have time to play with it.


Thursday, April 6, 2017

Nick Hodges Book Bundle

Just wanted to give a shout out to an Excellent Delphi Dude, Nick Hodges, who has recently made available a bundle of his three recent and very well done Delphi books, in a single bundle.

I have actually only read two out of the three, but based on the quality of those, I can unhesitatingly recommend that you buy yourself  a copy of these three excellent resources for Delphi developers.

Nick's book bundle is on leanpub here.