Jedi, an expensive hobby.

Being Delphi Jedi knight is expensive now-a-days.

Delphi costs US$899 and S&H and applicable taxes.

Now suppose you had US$899 to burn, what would you spend it on? In this day and age, US$899 would probably buy 40 trips of fuel (depending on price) or say, around a month's living expenses.

Would you spend US$899 and US$399 every year to do charity work? Php is free, Visual Studio Express is free, and so on...

Maybe I'll just save the money and use C# and VB.NET instead. It's pretty good, btw. At least I can learn something and get good job. Have you heard of any good Delphi jobs lately? I haven't.

Delphi 2007 update plan

From the newsgroups:

Hi guys.
Have Codegear a plan to lauch a new update for Delphi and Delphi.NET 2007 ? It´s absurd that your clients need to buy a D2009 and Prism to corret problems of a older version, right? We have HUGE problems with 2007 IDE ... more on .NET . Problems with generics thats disappears, IDE hangs after code completion in a generic object, big memory usage , slow switch beetwen design and source code ...


TeamB replies:
Now that 2009 has been officially released, I doubt 2007 wil get any more updates.

Why? That is how most software vendors work. Once a new version is released, older versions are no longer maintained, unless they use different architectures that have to continue being maintained in parallel.

Customer reply:It seems incredibly unfair of CodeGear to say "Thanks for the money, but no more bug-fixes for you."

LOL

Unusual Post. How to prevent Delphi third-party software piracy

This is perhaps the most unusual post I've ever posted.
Some Delphi developers have posted what should be done about Delphi third-party piracy.

Here is my best advice:

Delphi has an option to create both DCU and BPL packages.

Interestingly, when it creates a BPL package, it can link to the BPL without any DCUs required. This is called dynamic linking.

Thus, you can link your trial DCUs and BPLs. The person will link to the trial BPL without requiring any DCUs

Of course, when you have DCUs, they are unprotected assembly files while BPLs can be protected (e.g., using AssProtect, Arnie Armdillo).

Make me a BPL!
The most successful Delphi vendors I've seen never ship any DCUs with their trial products, they only ship BPLs. Much to the amusement, these vendors get lots of sales and healthly profits.

The vendors who are struggling often provide Trial-DCUs and sooner or later, cracked versions of their DCUs are floating around on the Internet.

DelphiHater's advice to all Dephi third-party vendors out there:
Start shipping your trial products with BPL only.

No DCUs are required to create the trial. Product your product using some copy-protection.
Then, watch how your trial customers get really pissed-off, and how they need to "buy" :)

Nearly Dead: ShellPlus reviewed

ShellPlus reviewed

It could be said the vendor is playing "Shell games" with delphi developers - with slow updates (1), buggy software (2) and spam-filled forum (3).

For point (3) See www.shellplus.com/forum/ for their forum :)

For point (1), look no further than the once-a-year DCU update and no Delphi 2009 support. In order to get Delphi 2009 support, you would probably have to wait more than 6 months from now. (They took 9 months to get Delphi 2007 support out :( )

They often hint you to buy the sources to fix the problems yourself. Since the Source code is updated on yearly basis (i.e., you buy the license every year) you can nearly forget about bug fixes.

For point (2) It don't work, work on Vista.
Surprisingly, the product does not work on Vista. The reason is because internal in the code, it has many internal access violations. The exact reason is because the author hard-wired many ShellPlus codes to fixed constants in Shell32.dll and User32.dll.

The source code is nearly worthless. Your blogger, Delphihater brought ShellPlus and sources, and later spent like nearly three hair-raising weeks adding Unicode support to it, fixing nearly hundreds of bugs with it (Did anyone notice their Mantis bug tracker site is password protected?) only to give up when none of the fixes work with Vista.

Eventually, DelphiHater re-did the whole Shell integration in C++, not because DelphiHater hates Delphi, but for these reasons:

1) Delphi has no 64-bit version, so 64-bit Explorer will not load 32-bit Delphi DLLs

2) Delphi 2009 (Unicode) has no good 3rd party support. In this case, ShellPlus has no Delphi 2009 version.

3) The shellplus code has DEP problems. It uses excessive pointers and don't free them correctly - big no-no in Windows XP-SP2, XP-SP3 where DEP is enabled by default.

4) You would have to extensively debug ShellPlus on Vista 32-bit SP1 to get it to work. Believe me, after that, you can drop ShellPlus.

5) Many things claimed don't work. The Explorer toolbar don't work correctly, the NSE-Name_Space libs don't work as claimed. There are so many issues outstanding.


Updated:
Please see my fan-mail response
Fan Mail response

March 2013 update:
They do not have a 64-bit version of their product. Even if you buy the source-codes, you will find it arduous task to update the whole library to 64-bits, then find lots of instability with your Shell Extension. Suggestion is to use C++ or C# - See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2194572/windows-shell-extension-with-c-sharp  

See: Article Corrections

Book Review: In Search of Stupidity

I brought the book In Search of Stupidity 2nd Edition.
The best laugh I had was Chapter 7:

Frenchmen Eats Frog, Chokes to Death:
Borland and Phillipe Kahn
(This review comes from the 2nd Edition, not the 1st Edition)

Insult upon Insult
The book starts off very simply with purchasing Ansa (the owner of Paradox database) then Surpass database (the product was renamed to QuattroPro). Where Kahn's behaviour got the better of him, was the purchase of Ashton-Tate (the makers of DBase). Most of Ashon-Tate's employees were treated very badly, destroying customer's databases, and AT's employees took time to call many key DBase gurus and told them how bad the Borland acquisition of DBase became.

Borland (by Kahn) made DBase "a diry language" and allowed DBase to rot, never bothered to fix many bugs (sounds similar?). Without any decent compiler, DBase languished. The Dbase community got nervous and then migrated to FoxPro.

Borland became Imprise and then Borland, then (some nonsense name), then later CodeGear and then their Tools divison got sold to Embarcadero.

Delphi Hater's Experience
Borland's high-handed tactic was to brand anyone who critized Borland's products troll, trouble-maker and insult upon insult.

Take for example, someone commenting how bad Delphi.NET is, and then branded as Troll (trouble-maker).
http://groups.google.com/group/borland.public.delphi.non-technical/browse_thread/thread/bf1d883ea6e71e84/62956bfe7291ea57

Website Obitruary: ducktech.com

Duck Reporting from DuckTech.com

Like many QuickReport alternatives, it is similar: All Delphi report writers are expensive, full of issues and with bad support.

Quack, Quack
Duck Reports is a report-writer with a report-writer editor and bar-code support. Like many report-writers, it was built for Delphi 3, Delphi 4, and Delphi 5, using the BDE engine.

It was really good, except the price was US$250 per license and like many Delphi vendors, no support for Delphi 6, Delphi 7. The product had little or no help files (not surprised) and very little support.

What happened?
The product looks good but there were serious problems - the lack of future Delphi support, the lack of features (e.g., dot-matrix printer) and BDE independence laid it to doom.

Eventually, ducktech.com went off-line.

Website Obituary: Classic Software

ClassicSw.com - the site now goes to new owner.

Classic Software was one of the first VCL components for Delphi.

The product library worked in 16-bits and 32-bit mode. Those of you who purchased it, it was for Delphi 1, Delphi 2, Delphi 3 and then the company closed down.

Classic Software sold their Chameleon Tabs and Component Collection. The Chameleon tabs was list of panels with owner-draw custom "tab-set". It claimed to have colored tabs, but the color tabs didn't go too well in 256 colors Windows. The different tab shapes were limited to 3 shapes: Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT style (not much use), the Glyphs didn't work so well in Windows 95/98.

Classic Components was simple custom-grid control with simple Editor, simple date-time picker, simple number (mask-edit) components embedded inside it.

The vendor was very responsive to sales questions but support was non-existent. Since the product was not generating any sales, it was left to rot. When sales went zero, the website went off-line.

What happened? Borland Delphi became Inprise Delphi which lead to much confusion... Another company, Woll2Woll InfoPower wrote better Grid, better editor.

If my memory serves me right, they advertised heavily (btw: costs alot of money) on Delphi Magazine, Delphi Developer Journal, Delphi Informant (or possibly more magazines) and perhaps, due to poor sales, closed down.

Website Obituary: VisualAccounting.com

Correction: www.ColumbuSoft.com came on-line, the site still is up.
The product is not maintained. Buyer beware.
Link to site: www.columbusoft.com

The next casualty I wish to discuss is VisualAccounting.com (site goes to cybersquatter) and Columbusoft. (now the site is off-line)

Accounts for Visual Basic was so much better. The people who worked on Accounts for Visual Basic, were honest, hard-working and truthful people who could account for everything: the profits and inventory.

No so with Accounts for Delphi.
Accounts for Delphi has colorful history. The source code was originally written in Clipper and ported to Delphi... and like many Delphi products, never maintained for the next 10 or so years. The owners milked money from unsuspecting users who brought broken product. This went on for nearly 10 years, (from 1998 onwards) and promoted on the Delphi Companion CD.

Ripoff Report.
http://www.ripoffreport.com/small-business-services/columbusoft-paul-fer/columbusoft-paul-ferrara-accou-dycc4.htm

The typical story is someone is in need of some accounting solution, and uses Excite, AltaVista or Yahoo (during those days) to search for the term Delphi and Accounting. Since the product is called Accounts for Delphi, the first 10 hits would be ColumbuSoft.com.

Emailing Paul (the owner), you would get very prompt replies - asking about how the product is, and how much it costs. On his website, he would explain how high-end Columbusoft is, how good the inventory system is (it actually is very poorly done) and a month after buying the product, Paul would then simply ignore the user.

For example,
the product was written in DBF (Database) aud used BDE alot. Besides that, the product fell apart when used. The inventory system had very serial-number scheme which didn't work on multiple PCs (add two items and it would lock-up because SYSxxx.DBF) would be locked for no reason.

The reports would never correctly print out more with texts more than 80-characters (depending on which printer or which driver you use). To admit, Paul later fixed it by adding true-type fonts, but didn't fix the underlying problem of slow reports.

The reports were very simple. If somebody did ever notice, the GL calculations were wrong, AFD would be in batch mode Posting and unposting would make the GL unaccurate. The instructions were to add your own code, yeah, right.

The inventory system had no correct FIFO, LIFO. If you entered wrong inventory numbers, there were no way to easily correct it.

The job posting were so simple it made mockery of accounting. There was no valid job posting number, no valid dates (Paul later fixed it by adding 4-digit dates) and later on, the thing would collapse because having two dates, it was frequent serial-number errors that caused much grief.

For the price of (US$500 (for base) and US$400 * 8) or US$3700, you would supposedly get high-end accounting system with full source code. What you got was shabby code, bad help files, and no technical support. (Paul later updated his site to US$300 for the base and US$250 per module and with discounts).

In the end, when someone filed report to ripoff report, that was the start of the end.

p.s., Nick, product manager of Delphi - if you are reading this, can you remove Accounts for Delphi from the companion CD. it's full of bugs.

p.s. #2: Nick, thank you for reading this blog. I do not see Columbusoft Accounts for Delphi anymore on the Delphi companion CDs.

p.s. #3: Nick, if you can remove Columbusoft for Delphi from all the whole Embarcadero site, that will be wonderful.


[20th April 2010 - links updated]

Article update #1 - March 2013
1) See Website obituary - Columbusoft.com

Website Obituary: ODBC98.com

My next website obituary goes to ODBC98.com, the ODBC library to connect from Delphi to ODBC.

The main reason why you needed to buy this "high-priced" library was so you could use ODBC without having to use BDE.

The BDE was depreciated and many bugs were not fixed, notably, the FoxPro bug where BDE corrupts FoxPro files and broken DBF files (file not found?).

Borland/Inprise/CodeGear/Embacarado (or whatever) recommends that you use ODBC or ADO or some high-priced library to use DBF, FoxPro, or ODBC-Compatible database.

The main reason why you don't want to use BDE was simple:
1) The thing is so, like, file-server like where there it uses TTable, TQuery and so slow -- Visual Basic 4, Visual Basic 5, Visual Basic 6 feels like jolt cola and cool-aid.

2) The sheer amount of frustrations needed to get BDE working. First, the installer (what installer?) to install BDE (erm, you needed paid copy of Wise 3.0, 4.0, 5.0) or InstallShield bloatware or something else. It was simply amazing BDE had no certified installer to come with it. (until Delphi 2005 came out - or after 6 years later).

3) The amount of bloat it added to your application was 6 or 7mb extra. That would translate to 5 or 6 more diskettes to ship your product.

4) The corruptions would essentially paralyze the PC: you had to reboot the PC to remove the locking and waste much time to resolve simple issues.

5) It had upto 255 users maximum. Of course, that is plain lie since nobody could possibly connect 255 users to single file: The actual limit was 52 users for one DBF file and 40 users for Paradox file. At least, ODBC got it right with connection pooling.

6) Anyone who possibly used BDE to host their CGI website? ... anyone game enough to spend US$200-300 a month on hosting?

Promises unkept. The owners kept promising updates, bug-fixes (what bug fixes?). He often hinted to buy the source code to protect your investment.

Later on, the website went away, odbc98 owners got rich, the delphi users got left with worthless library, all spent for nothing.


Article update #1 - March 2013
1) Prices for ISP hosting is at 2001 - 2008 estimated prices. Prices have dropped since then.

2) Odbc98.com goes to a non-existent site, the vendor moved on. 
See: Article Corrections

Kylix (Delphi for Linux) reviewed

it's been nearly 6 years since Kylix was released.

There was so many amazing reviews about Kylix. Here is my review.

I brought Kylix 1.0, 2.0 and then 3.0 and was very sorely disappointed. I consider it waste of money.

Delphi 6.0, 7.0 featured CLX components to allow cross-platform compatibility with Linux. There was much buzz about having credible, mature platform for developing applications on Linux.

The first thing to chime was memory leaks. Of course, what's wrong with memory leaks? the problem starts is when you open data connection, close it, the memory is not freed. After few hours, the application consumes all the memory and the Linux server goes down. You could fix it, but since Borland never gave out the sources for the CLX drivers and base (it's missing files) CLX library, you could never fix the bugs that Kylix had.

The next thing was many bugs were not fixed. Kylix 2.0 had no bug fix: it was just rehash of Delphi 7.0 code-base (instead of Delphi 6.0) updated to Linux. Kylix 3.0 was most amazing: Borland just recompiled to use QT3.0 instead of QT2.0 - without checking ANYTHING and NOT FIXING ANYTHING.

When Kylix came out, the TeamB were quick to cancel those nasty messages and interestingly enough, quick to ignore Kylix support.

[end of part 1].

Article update March 2013.
There is no part 2. There is an effort to update Kylix at: http://crosskylix.untergrund.net/

The biggest problem with IntraWeb

hi,
was playing around with IntraWeb lately and found the biggest problems with IntraWeb:

1) erm, the delphi software engineer made this really cool site, and needs to integrate the site with a web-template so the site looks even cooler.

a) need to put this template into IntraWeb.
b) struggle around to find some HTML add-on or IntraWeb component which allows free-flow template (left, right, top, bottom) around the IntraWeb controls.
c) Tell boss that it would take a month to do it, and give no results later on.

2) Tried using frames, but found out Frames were not supported so well.

3) Tried to integrate php or asp web-pages with IntraWeb but IntraWeb wouldn't play fair and ignore the integration. I mean, deep integration, like, can a PHP webpage click call an IntraWeb click and show something on Web-Grid?

4) Find how how suckky and bad the graphics for IntraWeb is. The IntraWeb web-grid looks really bad compared to the ASPX NET grids.

5) is there any site that uses IntraWeb you know of, that's used a lot?
can you also tell me the website other than atozed's website? i couldn't find any that's publicly available. Everyone said it's "confidential". (See #6)

6) Why is the IntraWeb serial number exposed on every-web-page of the web-page ??

META Name="GENERATOR" content="IntraWeb v8.XX.XX Serial XXXXXXXX"

How to write a Delphi app

By popular demand:

1) Heard about some exclusive language from your friends.

2) Buy the box (erm, need the Pro version, need to shell out around US$900 (US$870 + S&H) (or more depending on where you live). Wait few days later for the postman to arrive.

3) Start looking around the Help., erm... what help? The help topics are full of VB.NET and C# entries!

4) Convince yourself that spending hours upon hours with Delphi is better than spending with you girlfriend.

5) Put the menu bar and components on the dialog, erm, form. Eee. The Menu, Toolbar don't look so good and the grid looks out-dated!

6) Then realize that your app don't support Unicode well and need to get some Unicode-compatible libraries!

7) Put some edit controls there, but then you realize they don't handle validation so well. Need to get some good looking edit controls!

8) The out-dated grid has various bugs and errors. Need to find some good looking library to replace the grid!

9) Looked around for grid control, found one, erm, it costs US$300 for the grid! so expensive!. (I'll skip buying that gift to my girlfriend so I can finish that Delphi app)

10) Looked around for unicode control, erm, it costs US$49 for the library, so expensive.
(I'll skip some lunch so I can get these libs to finish the Delphi app).

11) The DbExpress is broken and my data can't get into Delphi. I can't connect well from Oracle or MSSQL! Need to find some Delphi library to connect to Oracle or MSSQL!

12) Indy is so chock full of bugs I can't even do something correctly! It keeps crashing all the time and my app looks stupid hanging! I need to get some delphi library so it works
(I'll skip buying that DVD player so I can shell out some bucks to buy some cool Internet library).

13) IntraWeb is only 5-user version! I need to get the full version of IntraWeb. I'll shell out my bonus money and overtime money so I can get this cool library. Then I need to buy some more libraries so I can get all the features I need to make that lousy website that nobody can use because nobody can use the back-button and and tolerate that 1990 look-and-feel.

14) Found out I had to find very expensive web-host to host my IntraWeb app! I had to give-up that cable subscription so I can pay for web-hosting fees.

15) PDF was big pain. The PDF didn't work so well, I had to shell out even more money for some PDF library. It came with subscription so I had to pay up every year!

16) Repeat 1..15 for every person I hire, or employ! This gets really, really expensive!

17) Never use anything that is ActiveX in it, or VB-compatible. Shell out hundreds of dollars on anything that is Delphi-only.

18) Promise everyone that you'll port it to Linux but won't, since Kylix is not so full of bugs and supports an outdated Linux version.

19) Delphi Job? what job? we don't use any Delphi here?

20) Get angry will all the bills you can't pay, then bitch and moan about Delphi problems. The newsgroups calls you troll and trouble-maker, then kick you out.

21) Wake-up from this Delphi delusion and realize you're not going anywhere with your career, job or getting that big salary everyone else gets.

Website Obituary - cgiexpert.com

Not quite an Expert.

CGI Expert reviewed.
CGI Expert heralds the day when web-scripting was not available and people hated Perl or .ASP.

In those days, HTML was in its infancy and Delphi was touted as the best CGI compiler. Delphi was anything but the best -

The main problem with Delphi was session control. The CGIs works fine (anyone remember Netscape 2.0 and IE 2.0 ?) but it was incredibly difficult to make make Internet web-pages with sessions. Sure, you could make a shopping cart, but the problem is placing cookies and HTTP session control to browser and remembering them.

Delphi supported Apache (old version), IIS (old version) and NSAPI (Netscape). The main and most difficult problem was it did not expose the IIS-session-control number (what number??) and Apache session ID for that browser. that made it extremely difficult to implement session control.

Two years passed, Delphi 6, Delphi 7 had same problem. It was difficult to make use website or shopping-cart (or anything meaningful) with Delphi.

Since CGI was considered security risk, there was difficult problem finding web-site hosts that supported CGI-BIN. Those sites would cost US$50-60 to host per month (or more like US$99+ with all the required features you needed).

Since the web-hosting costs money and few updates to CGI-Expert, it became quickly clear that it wasn't viable solution.


Article update #1 - March 2013
1) Prices for ISP hosting is at 2001 estimated prices. Prices have dropped since then.
See: Article Corrections

Exception Error Gem

======================================

From: "Steve Garland [ASTA]"
References:
Subject: Re: AsyncExceptions
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 17:20:48 -0600
Lines: 5
Organization: ASTA Technology Group Inc
X-Priority: 3
Message-ID: <0bretsnxhha .2744=".2744" astaweb01.astatech.ad="astaweb01.astatech.ad">
Newsgroups: astatech.general
NNTP-Posting-Host: 63.224.241.117

You need to get more information on the error, try adding madexcept to both
server and client www.madshit.net

======================================

Nice website :)



Article updates 2013 March
See: Wanted alive: Asta
See: QA Dept Asta Support
See: Exception error gem
See: Article corrections

Website Obituary - dxsock.com

my next website obituary goes to dxsock.com and brainpatchworkdx.com (site goes to cybersquatter)

DxSock reviewed
High prices, bad product.

This product is meant to complete against Indy. Despite all the bugs that Indy had, it worked. It worked for small projects and open-source. That meant that people could fix the bugs it had and contribute to the product. DxSock and DxInternet was closed-source and the only advertising came from shill statements from Ozz's friends recommending DxSock or DxInternet.

There was no way to try out DxSuck without paying for it. It costed US$899 (or more?). DxInternet was equally worse. There was no demo except paying US$199 (or more?) for it.

When paid, Ozz would deliver the sources as "it is". Promising more upgrades in the future.
(What upgrades?)

Let's see... From one of my friends:
The demos were bad or non-existent. The help file was also non-existent or "nothing". The source code was bad too. There were plenty of places marked "to-do" or the code was not there. Many of the protcols were not handles well or gave errors. For example, the SMTP component did not support SMTP auth well (password rejected?) or IRC component was empty. ("It's under development")...

Trying to get any support was equally bad. My friend got get several MS-Exchange "read-responses" but no reply.

The last post on DxSock's forum was from 2006.

Cyber Squatters now sit on that website.
Updated March 2013 -
Site is still alive but not updated since 2010.
See: Article Corrections

Website Obituary - athrasoft.com

The first website obituary goes to Athrasoft, maker of SmartPlugin Library for Delphi.

from 2001/Dec - 2008/aug


This website was up and running for seven years, the owners probably wasted (US$30 * (12 * 7)) or US$2520 on webhosting fees. Since it supports Delphi 5 to Delphi 2007, the owners probably wasted around (US$2000 + (US$800 * 4)) US$5200 on Delphi itself.


Smart-Plugin stymied by BPL issues.


Each version of Delphi, the BPLs are very specific to each version of Delphi. Borland's BPLs are different from DLLs in the sense they contain run-time information. The trouble starts when you compile different versions of components or libraries and want to share them across BPLs. You have to program use BPLs for the whole product to be compatible.


In the end, you ship whole load of BPLs into your program.


But wait. There are many tutorials to write your own plug-ins found on the Internet, so you could write your own plug-in system and no need Smart-Plug-in.


Since most of the plug-in knowledge is available, Smart-Plugin died slow death.


Article update #1:
1) The website now goes to a C# consultancy business now.

Article update #2 - March 2013
2) Prices for ISP hosting is at 2001 - 2008 estimated prices. Prices have dropped since then.
See: Article Corrections

This bug has 13 lives.

On the newsgroup, I found rare bug:

QC: 7527 TDBGrid vertical scrollbar dissappears

From Delphi D7 to Delphi 2009 this very annoying bug is not fixed.

This bug has been around for nearly 10 years and still not fixed. At the way how things go, maybe this bug will be fixed, say, 3 or 5 years later?

When will it be fixed?
Maybe in Delphi XE1, or maybe in Delphi XE2, or maybe Delphi XE3...
Also in QC: 81334 (boredom...)


Article update on March 2013 -

Please see:
https://forums.embarcadero.com/thread.jspa?messageID=534654
http://qc.embarcadero.com/wc/qcmain.aspx?d=81334 (related)

See: Article Corrections

First Post

This blog is styled similar to Linux Haters blog.

LHB, I love you :)

This blog is styled towards exposing all the bugs and serious issues with Delphi.