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I am eagerly awaiting DevExpress to release DXperience 2010.1. As a subscriber to their technologies you can access a preview version of their product and I just noticed that the Release Candidate is available.
Why am I so excited? Let me just give you a couple of reasons from what I saw with the beta version already:

• The new installer gets you set up right away without any hussle. Furthermore, even the registration process is handled very easily. You do not have to fiddle with any long key strings. You simply enter your user credentials and setup will select your products. VS2008 and VS2010 can be used side by side and the installer registers all the components in both IDEs - if you wish to.
• Uninstall is just as easy and leaves no baggage behind. I think everybody who ever used a 3rd party component set knows what I am getting at…
• One installer, all the products. I just love to only have to download one file, run one installer and also only to have to enter my user credentials once. A real time-saver. You have all the components for the different frameworks and also the IDE tools. Best, if you do not like it that way, DevExpress offers individual downloads as well.
• Full integration into VS 2010. The new Visual Studio has been released recently and I can make full use of it with all the controls I need. In particular all the designers and little IDE helpers work for the full development experience.
• VS is using WPF now. DevExpress offers huge improvements in that area. The new WPF controls and the added features to the already existing WPF control set made me realize how useful the subscription is in order to stay up-to-date and be able to deliver new, innovative technologies to my customers.
• ASP.NET MVC support. Heck, I have been waiting for that. I love the MVC approach for web applications and I truly did not develop any bigger projects with MVC as I was missing the variety for controls I could use. Yes, there are JavaScript libraries, but I did not have enough time to learn yet another language
• Grids, Layout Controls and Charts. All my apps rely heavily on displaying and editing of data (I mean, most apps do). The component set offers me a very good toolset, not only to allow the user to browse data, but also to edit data. 2010.1 really took yet another giant leap forward in that area as all basic components like textedit, button edit etc. are available in WPF now as well.

I could go on and on, but those are my favorite aspects I am very excited about.

Let me give you an example why the decision by Embarcadero to deliver all languages with the very same DVD or download is one of the most overlooked features.

I am a big big fan of strategy games on the PC platform. Thus, I bought Anno 1404, definitely a purchase I never regret as the game is truly the best real-time strategy game I ever played so far. I bought it… Continue reading

Today, I wanted to display a time-value of 9 minutes and 3 seconds like this: 09:03

Thus, I typed this snippet into my Objective-C code:

labelTimer.text = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%2d:%2d", minutes, seconds ];
[/code]

This did not yield the result I wanted. The numbers were padded with spaces, not zeros. Sadly, Apple left out the options for the different format specifiers like f, d, @ … completely. You have to rely on old C skills… Continue reading

If you have ever written code in Java or .NET, you will truly learn to appreciate the garbage collection, i.e. objects that are no longer referenced are being freed from memory. Automatically no less.

A lot of people do not like it for reasons of their own and I do not want to get into those.

What I do want to discuss is that in an environment in which you are responsible… Continue reading

I would like to point the following out as some people asked why I was still categorizing my last two posts for Delphi as well.

The next couple of posts will be using RemObjects SDK and RemObjects DataAbstract with .NET to deliver data for an iPhone application. The two previous posts are needed in order to understand my train of thoughts. I will mark these posts with the Delphi category, i.e… Continue reading