The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

The #reflector licensing debacle

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/02/06

Earlier this week, Red Gate announced that the new Reflector version 7 would cost USD 35, as of March 2011, and the current free version 6.6 will expire on May 30th, 2011.

That caused a lot of stir, on their forum, twitter, reddit and a lot of other places. Even an old thread at StackOverflow got a new boost. It seems Red Gate did not read Social media judo: How to turn a fight into a brand-building moment.

Here is a summary of the past, present and future of things happening around reflector, including some workarounds and alternative products.

First a bit of history.

Lutz Roeder over the years developed .NET Reflector as a free tool. A few hightlights: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Development, Prism, Software Development | 4 Comments »

Redirecting Routes To Maintain Persistent URLs

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/02/03

Interesting reading: Redirecting Routes To Maintain Persistent URLs.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, ASP.NET, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Windows Azure platform 30 day pass – not only for USA people

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/02/03

A lot of places mentioned that Microsoft is offering a Windows Azure platform 30 day pass for USA people.

But visiting the Windows Azure platform 30 day pass link includes an extensive country list.

So it looks like non USA people can make use of it too.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Cloud Development, Delphi, Development, Software Development, Windows Azure | Leave a Comment »

Will #Cecil – #Mono be the #reflector successor?

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/02/02

RedGate: pay attention to Cecil – Mono.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Twitter / @Erik van Appeldoorn: Reading code is way much h …

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/01/31

No need to elaborate:

Reading code is way much harder than writing code. So please write readable code.

–jeroen

via Twitter / @Erik van Appeldoorn: Reading code is way much h ….

Posted in .NET, Delphi, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

If you have an account on SourceForge.net, then you need to reset your password now

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/01/31

If you have an account on SourceForge.net, then now you need to reset your password by visiting https://sourceforge.net/account/registration/recover.php.

SourceForge.net was attacked recently (the whole story is on exploit-DB), so they are requesting everyone to reset their passwords.

I got a mail about it last weekend, and their blog now contains this message: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, Delphi, Development, Power User, Software Development, Source Code Management, SourceForge | Leave a Comment »

Delphi dcc64 compiler engineer Yooichi Tagawa now on twitter as YooichiTagawa

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/01/20

Thanks to this thread, which regrettably has vanished from the Embarcadero Forums server*, I learned that Yooichi Tagawa (also known in the Delphi world as [Wayback/Archive] Tagawa-San)  got himself a Twitter account named [Wayback/Archive] YooichiTagawa.

Boy didn’t I know he was involved (dead link, alive at WayBack and on Archive.is) at the end of the 80s with the [Wayback] UNIX and [Wayback/Archive] VAX/VMS versions of [Wayback/Archive] LHa/LHarc during my university years. From the last link:

Upstream Authors:

LHarc 0.01-1.00: Yooichi Tagawa (LHa code taken from here, 1988-1989) Nikkei-mix ID: y.tagawa (Now this is defunct BBS, Licensing term in manual page come from his licence for lharc) His new web page seems to be www2s.biglibe.ne.jp/~yex/ yooedit2001@yahoo.co.jp is the contact e-mail address for another software. Page updated at least July/2001

LHa 0.01-1.00: Masaru Oki (LHa original author, 1991-1992) E-Mail address: oki@netbsd.org

Trivia: [Wayback/Archive] Years ago, he entered the team as a localization engineer.

Some LHARC history dating back to 1988:

[Wayback/Archive] Availability heuristic. I think your perspective may be warped by two things: no… | Hacker News (2014):

One of the most capable engineers I’ve ever worked with is a guy called Yooichi Tagawa. The guy has an incredible appetite for complexity, as well as spooling up on old codebases and new technologies. But you’ll find very little by him online, both because he’s Japanese and doesn’t use English often, and also he’s squirrelled away inside Embarcadero, working on Delphi compiler as he’s been doing for the past 15 years or so.

Edit 20230619

Added archived links, information from Barry Kelly (barrkel)  and remarks about vanishing information.

  • I really wish Embarcadero had and has more sense of keeping historic material available (possibly in archived form). On the one hand they keep boasting that their products are of historic importance (they are), but on the other hand they have plainly giving up on keeping information up (or have it archived at the Internet Archive): forums server, blog server, docwiki.

I wonder how long Delphi 7, 2007 and 2009 HTML documentation on the HTML [Wayback/Archive] RAD Studio Product Documentation – Embarcadero Technologies server will stay available. That page lists most products since Delphi 7 but from Delphi 2010 on, none of the Wiki links still produce the documentation for that specific version hampering for instance maintainers of legacy systems: the products still work (hell would break loose when the license servers stopped supporting legacy versions!), but the built in links to the Wiki produce no or different information.

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, History, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Formatted sourcecode in WordPress: uses SyntaxHighlighter 3.0; complete list of supported languages

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/01/18

In the past I wrote a few blog posts on posting sourcecode in WordPress.

Nick Hodges‘ last Flotsam and Jetsam blog post pointed me to the SyntaxHighlighter JavaScript that is used by WordPress and many other engines/sites.

Their site contains an even more elaborate list of supported languages.

I had the basic list right in my last post, but was missing all the aliases (which often are easier than the longer proper names).

This is the new table adapted from their list: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, Batch-Files, C#, CSS, Database Development, Delphi, Delphi for PHP, Development, HTML, HTML5, Java, PowerShell, RegEx, Scripting, SQL, VBS, Web Development, WordPress, XML, XML/XSD, XSD | 5 Comments »

batch file scripts to get current date and current time in sortable ISO 8601 format

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/01/10

ISO 8601 is a great format for date and time (and combined) values.
It allows for both interchange of information, and ease of sorting values.

Recently, I had to create some backup and logging scripts for a 3rd party turn-key installation at a client.
You know: the kind of installation where the 3rd party manages to break their own scripts, but at the mean time close the system so much, that you cannot do anything but standard batch-file scripts.

The system runs partially on a Workstation that is based on a Dutch version of Windows XP, and a server that runs an English version of Windows Server 2008.
Recipe for some twiddling in order to keep the scripts working on both systems, and not to get bitten by localization.

This answer to a StackOverflow question got me a nice head-start: it was said to work in both the English and Portugese versions of Windows.
This post is the process to get correctly function batch-files towards the end of the post.

Of course, we Dutch are persistent enough to have yet different output for the %date% pseudo variable and the date and date /t commands.
The same holds for the %time% pseudo variable and the time and time /t commands.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Batch-Files, Development, ISO 8601, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP | 4 Comments »

my 2010 blog in review

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/01/03

Don’t you love automated stuff.
Wordpress has a helper monkey that wrote me an email with stats, very similar to the results below.

From the stats page, I already know that popular posts not only include Delphi (where I originally came from) but also lots of other technologies: vmware, .NET, JRE, infrastructure.
Currently I’m doing quite a bit of iPhone/iPad work, so that likely will be reflected in the results next year.

What amazes me is the most popular day: according to the helper monkey it had 1 view :-)

Don’t you love the computing business :-)

–jeroen

Helper Monkey Results

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Development, Power User, Software Development, Virtualization, VMware, VMware Converter | Leave a Comment »