Those boxes are supposed to be Japanese, Chinese, and Russian characters, but since the full language support isn’t installed on the machine where this screen shot was taken, it displays the boxes instead of the actual characters.

It’s pretty easy to add the functionality (though you’ll likely need your OS disc.  I know that you carefully saved that DVD when you bought your computer, so this won’t be an issue, right?  ).

The steps to add the Supplemental Language support are as follows:

1. Open the Control Panel
2. Double click on Regional and Language Option
3. Go to the "Languages" Tab
4. In the "Supplemental Language Support", select either or both checkboxes. Check the first one for Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Indic, Thai, and Vietnamese, and the second ones for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
5. Click Ok and Windows will install the files.  (Windows will likely ask for your Windows DVD.)

Once you do that, the Tiburon IDE will be more than happy to display all different kinds of languages and alphabets.  Note, however, that you’ll need to use a font in the IDE that actually supports the fully Unicode codepage for the language in question.  In the picture below, I’m using Courier New:

(By the way, the above text says "Welcome to the world of Unicode using Delphi 2009!!" in Japanese, Chinese, and Russian.  Or at least I think so — maybe some of my co-workers played a joke on me.  )

And here’s the actual code being run in the application:

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One of the reasons that I’ve been away is that things are starting to pick up with our next release, code-named Tiburon. 

Probably the biggest feature — and the one that you’ve likely heard the most about — is Unicode.  Tiburon will be a completely Unicodified (yes, I’ll take credit for making up that word ) product.  That means every single part of it will be based on and use UnicodeString as the default string.  That means everywhere: compiler, RTL, VCL, IDE, COM, dbExpress, everything. 

But Unicode isn’t the only feature in the box — far from it.  In the coming weeks, you’ll be seeing lots information about all the cool stuff coming in Tiburon.  Stuff like new VCL components, a really cool new DataSnap framework (that still works with your existing DataSnap applications), a new COM and ActiveX architecture, new language features like Generics and Anonymous Methods, IDE enhancements, and  much more.  You can get the first taste on David I’s blog.  There will be videos and articles online, as well as events around the world demonstrating the product.

So keep your eyes open, and take a look at what we’ve been up to for the past year or so.  If you have questions, please feel free to comment here.  I’ll answer emails if you like, but a conversation here on the blog would be visible to everyone.

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I’ve yet to buy anything from them — I keep meaning to just for the fun of it — but I usually keep an eye on Woot. But this site — The Something Store — takes it even a step further. You basically pay $10 for something — you don’t know what, but you’ll get something for $10. Usually it isn’t much, but occasionally they send out stuff worth way more than ten bucks. Looks fun. I wonder whom I’ll buy from first — woot.com or thesomethingstore.com

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Create detailed maps of any seabed area using your GPS and Sounder. Discover new fishing grounds, prevent loss of fishing gear, catch fish in less time saving on fuel costs, map the entrance of your habour or discover new mining areas. Plus many more features…

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"FreeCommander is an easy-to-use alternative to the standard windows file manager. The program helps you with daily work in Windows. Here you can find all the necessary functions to manage your data stock. You can take FreeCommander anywhere - just copy the installation directory on a CD, USB-Stick or even a floppy disk - and you can even work with this program on a foreign computer."

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First, we’ve added a Delphi Resource Page.  On this page, we’ve put in some of the popular blogs, web sites, toolkits, and other resources that are useful for Delphi developers.  We’ve concentrated on resources for beginners, things that will help your productivity, and things to help you get nice user interfaces up and running very quickly. If there is a site you think should be in on the Resource page, let me know. 

Secondly, we’ve added a "Feature Drill Down".  Here, we have an outline of the major feature areas, with sub items for the specific features, that then take you to a short description and/or screen shot of the feature.  Right now, the feature drill downs aren’t completely comprehensive.  We’re working to flesh them out more.  If there are areas or specific features that you’d like to see, let me know.

I think both of these are nice additions to the web site, particularly for those folks not so familiar with Delphi’s features and capabilities, and for those folks wanting to get started in the community.

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• • Kim Madsen — So long Borland.. it has been a true rollercoaster ride with lots of fun on the way!
  • Marco — Delphi Jumps Ship: Welcome Embarcadero
  • Embarcadero Acquires CodeGear (nee Borland Languages)
  • Allen has a nice take on a slightly crazy day yesterday
  • David I, of course
  • Anders Ohlsson’s take
  • John Kaster, too.
  • Chris Bensen times two.
  • NewChance:=TEmbarcadero.create(CodeGear);
  • Discussion on joelonsoftware.com
  • Roland BeenHakker — EmbarraWhat?, Embarcedar, Embarcadero…

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Embarcadero Technologies® to Acquire CodeGear™ from Borland Software

There is also an FAQ, Customer letter from Wayne Williams, the CEO of Embarcadero Technologies, as well as a Community Letter from David I.

For a view from the Embarcadero side of things, you can read this blog post from Greg Keller, the Products Manager at Embarcadero.

Go ahead and read all that stuff.  I’ll wait.

<finger strumming>

Done?  Great.  And now, I have to tell you, I am thrilled with this.  Totally thrilled. Seriously.  It is hard for me to conceive of a non-fantasy based outcome for us, the products, and our customers that could have been better.  Merging into Embarcadero Technologies is going to be awesome.  I’m already thinking up new products, combinations and SKUing that is really, really exciting.  If you haven’t taken a look at the Embarcadero product line up, please do. There is some seriously cool stuff there.  All of the products are database-neutral, just like us.  All of them are developer tools. 

The cool part is that the Embarcadero product line is completely complementary to Delphi.  Delphi’s bread an butter has always been client/server development with rich, powerful Windows interfaces.  Database access has always been a key and valuable part of the product, but we never really ventured over the world of database design and management.  Where Delphi lets off, tools like Rapid SQL and ER Studio start.    

And a word for you guys who don’t care about databases and don’t know a SELECT statement from a hole in the wall.  Delphi still is and will continue to be the tool of choice for you.  How could it not be?  We’ve got some really cool stuff on our roadmap for this year including VCL enhancements, language enhancements like Generics and Anonymous Methods, as well as Unicode development that will continue to make Delphi the best development tool in the world.  If database isn’t your thing, we still have you covered like we always have.  Not to worry.  It’s me, remember? 

Okay, enough for now.  No doubt this will be a topic for a while, eh?

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I still buy programming books, but I find that I don’t buy the books that "teach you to program <insert language name> in <insert ever shrinking period of time>." Instead, like Jeff Atwood, I tend to buy books about the practice of software development — my latest is Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass.  This is a cool book. Easy to read, and full of terrific nuggets of wisdom.  Probably my all time favorite is The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas.  Atwood makes a great, great point when he says, "If you feel compelled to clean house on your bookshelf every five years, trust me on this, you’re buying the wrong programming books."   I think he’s dead on about that.  (I’m happy to note that the two books I mentioned above are in his list of top five programming books. I need to get Peopleware and Don’t Make Me Think.) 

I have been involved with the publishing of a few books done in the "old-school" way, and I dare say it is really, really inefficient.  Really inefficient.  Really, really inefficient.  There were editors and more editors and them some other editors.  And they don’t know one thing about programming.  (I remember a book in the early days of Delphi where an editor decided that the word "Pascal" should be replaced with "Delphi" everywhere.  Or maybe it was the other way around.  In any event, it wasn’t pretty.)  You have to submit your work to them in a special MS Word template, and then they comment (generally very ignorantly), and then you do a huge back and forth with them.  Then of course, once the book fiiiinally gets past that treacherous gauntlet, they print up boxes and boxes and boxes of them, ship them all around the country, put them on shelves, sell a few, and eventually box the remainders up again and send them back to the publisher.  They pay the author a very small royalty relative to the book price. This whole thing simply does not make sense to me.

Marco Cantu was here last week — and he graciously gave me a signed copy of his new "Essential Pascal".  This book was printed on demand by Lulu, and is a nicely made and bound as any book I have.  Marco has been very pleased with the way his Lulu publishing as gone.  Julian Bucknall has said the same thing about his The Tomes of Delphi: Algorithms and Data Structures.  There is a nice collection of Delphi books on Lulu, including a number of them from Dr. Bob as well. (Ray Konopka, call your agent!) 

On demand publishing is clearly the future.   It’s a classic case of cutting out the middle man.  A guy like Marco makes a lot more money per book sale, so he doesn’t have to sell as many books to make it worth his while.  This enables authors to publish books of smaller and tighter scopes — that is, books that the traditional publishing industry wouldn’t touch in a million years.  This is good for authors — they make money where they wouldn’t have been able to previously. 

It is also good for customers — they get books that they want that would never have been published under the previous model.  Prices are lower, too, because with the overhead gone, authors can charge less and still make more.  It’s simply a vastly superior business model.  And the cool thing is that anyone can publish almost any book at all, and sell it to anyone.  You could, quite literally, take that paper you wrote for a conference a while back, work it up a bit, and be selling online in a week.  I don’t know why I haven’t done it.

Why haven’t you? 

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If you don’t have the IDE set to automatically check for updates, then do a:

Start|All Programs|CodeGear RAD Studio|Check for Updates

and it should tell you about the April 08 Help Update.

Or, if you prefer, you can download the Help Update from the Registered User Page.

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• CapableObjects, the guys who build ECO — an integral part of Delphi — have a spiffy new website.
• DZone is a pretty cool site that I found today and signed up for.  It’s sort of like a Digg just for developers. It looks fairly new, as nothing seems to have very many votes, but it seems worth a look anyway.  I’m always interested in good programming articles, and it seems like a nice place to find them.  And while you are there, feel free to pump up this story. 
• Now here is a Star Trek fan with waaaaayyyy too much time on his hands.  But he does prove a point we all know to be true. 
• Perspicacity from the newsgroups: "Delphi is the only game in town for productive, powerful desktop Win32 apps." — Roger Lascelles

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Some things to note:

• This hotfix applies to all versions of Delphi 2007, C++Builder 2007, and RAD Studio 2007.
• You must have the December Update installed for this hotfix to work correctly.  Your About Box will tell you if you have the December Update.
• Being a hotfix, it merely fixes a select number of bugs — eight to be exact.  See the Readme for details.
• Being a hotfix, it will not alter the About Box at all — you can only tell if you’ve applied it by knowing that you have.  ;-)  If you are concerned, it is perfectly safe to apply it again.  Heck, apply it every day if you like.  No harm done.
• Being a hotfix, it will not be part of your MSI library.  Therefore, if you do a repair, you’ll need to apply the hotfix again.

For localized versions of the Readme:

• German: http://dn.codegear.com/article/37878/
• French: http://dn.codegear.com/article/37879/
• Japanese: http://dn.codegear.com/article/37880/

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There are a lot of really cool things going on with this product.  First up:  there are some great features that make building PHP applications even easier.  You can check them out at in PDF form, or you can go here to read about them:

http://www.qadram.com/vcl4php/docwiki/index.php/What_is_new_in_Delphi_for_PHP_2.0

Oh, wait, hey, check out that link!  That’s right — that’ a Documentation Wiki!  The entire set of documentation for Delphi for PHP 2.0 is on a Wiki. Sweet!  So get busy and help out!  Be advised that all contributions are governed by a Creative Commons License, and things posted to the Wiki very likely will end up in the "official" help file in the product.  We have it set up so that the current state of the wiki can be captured and included as the official help, and we’ll be doing that. 

We’ve also been getting a lot of great press:

• The Press Release
• InfoWorld: CodeGear upgrades PHP IDE by Paul Krill
• The Register: CodeGear’s Delphi PHP suite gets nip and tuck job
• Internet News (with quotes from yours truly): PHP IDE Space Gets Competitive
• eWeek (feel free to rate this article, by the way) : CodeGear Enhances PHP Tool 
• SDTimes: CodeGear widens database support in upgrade to Delphi PHP 2.0

Hey, do you want to help out even more than updating the Wiki?  There are a couple of ways for you to do that.

First, you can contribute to the VCL for PHP project, which is an open source project on SourceForge.  You can contribute new components, fix bugs, and generally improve the code base.

You can also help by localizing the IDE to your favorite spoken language.  Delphi for PHP 2.0 supports community-contributed localizations for the IDE.  Out of the box we provide such localizations for:

• English
• German
• Traditional Chinese
• Portuguese
• Japanese
• Spanish

And we also make it easy for further localizations to be done, so if you can make an IDE localization in your language of choice, please do.  Donate it to the community, and we all can benefit.

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There are 24 entries in Zarko’s "Creating Fancy Applications" Delphi Contest. I may have an app laying around that I’m going to submit. 

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"FL Studio is the most complete virtual studio currently available. It will play any sample file (wav), generator (softsynth), VSTi & DXi) or midi instrument you feed it."

I’m told that they get 5,000,000 downloads a year — pretty slick.

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And the cool part is it is free.

And it is a PortableApp. 

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Specify.That(Add(2, 2), Should.Equal(4));
Specify.That(Control.Caption, Should.Equal(’Close’).IgnoringCase);
Specify.That(ElapsedTime, Should.Be.AtMost(500));

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Internally, the process has been quite smooth.  The process went like this:

We only in the early pre-Alpha stages, but as a result, we already have:

As part of the process, we had a partner summit here this past week. We invited some of our key technology partners out to look at early versions of Tiburon, and they ran their code against it.  They all were able to make great progress towards converting their code in just the one day they were here.  All of them reported that the porting process was quite easy, and they were very pleased with how it all went.  A number of them had their entire code based transitioned to the new compiler and RTL and had their components up and running within a few hours.  All in all, it was quite painless for the guys who build components and products for Delphi.  Everyone was quite pleased at the end of the day. We were happy because we got to see some of the fruits of our labor, and the partners were happy because they rather easily had much of their code up and running very quickly.   As a result, we are more confident than ever that we are on the right track and that the vast majority your existing code will make the leap to a Unicode product just fine.

Our Chief Scientist Allen Bauer has revealed a little bit of the specifics of what we are up to, so if you need to know more about the bits and bytes side of things, give him a read. But from the Product Manager side of things, we are ahead of schedule and moving along nicely.  We’ll continue to roll out information as it becomes available, but you can rest assured that your existing code base, to a very, very large degree, is safe, and will compile with Tiburon.  There will be certain code idioms that will need to be checked and reviewed, and we’ll be letting you know about those things in the coming weeks. The cool part is that many of the changes you can do now with the existing compiler, and such changes, minor as they are, will give you a more robust code base.  We are working hard to ensure that the migration to Tiburon is as smooth as possible, and our process (which, believe me, gives the compiler, the RTL, and the VCL a really good workout; there are advantages to building Delphi in Delphi) has shown us that our work will reap rewards for your code base.

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• RemObjects has published their 2008 Roadmap.
• The CodeGear folks in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) are busy. Have you checked out http://www.codegear-events.eu, where they are running web seminars something like every fifteen minutes? Okay, it might not be that often, but it sure seems like it. Many of these seminars are in English, and you don’t have to be in the EMEA region to sign up. The times might not be perfect for you if you aren’t in the EMEA region, but the replays are available 24 hours a day.
• If you haven’t noticed what is up over there, you should head over to Hallvard Vassbotn’s blog. He’s re-running all of his Delphi Magazine articles that he had written over the years. Hallvard is a seriously smart guy and an outstanding writer, so don’t miss all the great content that he’s publishing there.

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I’m pretty excited about this new product. We’ve worked with SystemObjects in the past, but we decided to take the partnership a step further and create an actual product that includes connectivity to AS/400 and System i machines. There are a lot of old, green-screen type applications out there that can now be easily and quickly modernized and brought to either the browser or the Windows desktop. Developers can access AS/400 and System i data just like any other data in Delphi — a few components hooked up together and you are running and displaying data immediately.

If you are a Delphi guy, this is good news — you can now get your foot in the door at companies that use AS/400s. You can show them how you can use Delphi to create powerful, rich GUI-based applications for them in Windows or in the browser.

If you already have Delphi, you can purchase the connectivity to AS/400 separately. If you don’t, you can buy the whole package together.

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