Hotfixes, CodeRage, Field Testing, and CodeGear
Well, time to do a little catching up. We’ve been quite busy around here, and I’ve let a few bloggable items get past me.
HotFix Rollup for BDS 2006
We have released a new set of hotfixes for Borland Developer Studio 2006. Registered users can go to the Registered User Page and selec the Hotfix link and download the installer that isntalls these new hotfixes. Discussion about what is fixed is in the readme that the installer displays or you can view it here. The biggest thing for me was the large improvements in WSDL imporation and general SOAP issues.
CodeRage 2007
The Developer Relations folks never seem to sleep. Their latest brilliant concoction is “CodeRage 2007“. CodeRage is a “virtual conference“, meaning it will be streamed online. There should be plenty of your favorite conference speakers and familiar community members participating, as well as CodeGear R& Engineers and QA people giving talks as well. I imagine I’ll have a presentation or two to do as well. The conference will be online from March 12-16. The best part is that the whole thing is FREE. (Now, there are a lot of conference prices out there that you can pay, but I think we’ll all agree that FREE is the best price out of all of them.)
So, be sure to join us then, and please help spread the word, too.
Opening Up the Field Test
Well, the response to the opening up of the Delphi Field Test has been a bit overwhelming. That’s great. I’ll be getting all the invites out early next week. Some of you complained about the restrictiveness of the Field Test — and that’s cool. If you don’t want to be so restricted, you don’t have to. That’s why I wanted to be upfront about how we do things. To all of you who have expressed an interest, keep your eyes peeled for an invite. (A few of you won’t get invites because I didn’t get much more information from you than an aliased web email account — sorry.)
Michael Swindell in the Newsgroups
As Marco pointed out, my boss, Michael Swindell, has been posting a bit in the newsgroups. I’ll just follow up by saying that pretty much all we on the Delphi/C++Builder team are working on is being driven by direct customer requests and inputs. The survey has had a lot of influence over what we are up to. As Michael pointed out, we are very focused on Win32 for the first part of the year, but we are also pressing on in the .Net arena. As a company, i.e. outside of just my group, we are working on a bunch of really cool initiatives, some of which will be visible very soon, and some of which may take a little longer. (Yesterday I saw something that made me positively giddy). Overall, CodeGear is really gearing up (sorry) and getting rolling. 2007 should be a good year at the place where developers matter.
You know what would make me positively giddy? A way to find out what’s in the hotfix rollup without downloading and running the whole 13.2MB installer first! I wonder if CodeGear could find a way to put a direct link to the README file on the updates page.
In fact, now that I’ve downloaded it, I see that I actually have to install update 2 first, before I can see what’s in the latest fixes. Good grief!
February 10th, 2007 at 3:36 pmIt’s even worse than that. I tried opening the installer in WinZip so I could peek at the README. I can see that there’s a README there, but I can’t actually read it without a password.
February 10th, 2007 at 3:38 pmFinal summary:
It took me roughly an hour and a half to get to the point where I could see what’s fixed and decide whether I want to install the update. Before reaching that point, I needed to *install* Update 2 (62MB for a total download burden of 76MB) and accept the license agreement for the latest hotfix rollup.
February 10th, 2007 at 5:07 pmDid either of you think of clicking on the link provided at the begining of this post, namely: "you can view it here"?
February 10th, 2007 at 5:08 pm"Either of me" is one person unless I have a split personality I don’t know about, but I guess I didn’t see that link. Anyway, that doesn’t really address the general problem, since the normal path to the update from the company home page doesn’t lead through Nick’s blog. Notice that the URL for that link is "http://bdntv.borland.com/pix/NickHodges/HotFixRollup2Readme.txt" so it’s something Nick went out of his way to put in a special place, because it doesn’t fit into the ordinary update site mechanism.
February 10th, 2007 at 5:27 pmthat link was a favor, until this rollup will be posted on CodeCentral; remember the first one? http://cc.codegear.com/item/24132
February 10th, 2007 at 6:16 pmAfter HotFix2 users must manual register "Borland.Studio.AspInterop.dll"
to work Delphi Personality ???
Run
Regasm c:\program files\borland\bds\4.0\Bin\Borland.Studio.AspInterop.dll
S.S.
February 11th, 2007 at 12:52 amNone of the dates on the Registered User page shows Feb 2007, so which update got updated? If I’ve installed the updates/hotfixes that are listed there in January, am I OK? Or did something actually update the other day?
February 11th, 2007 at 2:28 pmSir Look at
http://info.borland.com/06/bds/bds2006_reg_updates_down.html
Hotfix Rollup link isBDS2006HotFixRollup2.exe (about 13.6 Mb)
Http://altd.borland.com/download/bds/bds_2006/hotfixes/hotfixrollup2/BDS2006HotFixRollup2.exe
NOT the Old BDS2006HotFixRollup.exe (about 8.2 Mb)
I am too old to write wrong things…
Don’t forget to register “Borland.Studio.AspInterop.dll” .NET Library to work Pascal Personality.
S.S.
February 11th, 2007 at 3:39 pmCodeRage is the best bit of news I have heard in a while. I think this could be huge. Kudos to the CG folks for this idea. Now make it happen!
February 12th, 2007 at 9:07 amSo can you install this hotfix rollup, if you have already installed the previous hotfix rollup?
February 12th, 2007 at 9:57 pmYes Sir.
February 13th, 2007 at 1:59 am