Resources for Unicode in Delphi

I’ve had a few people ask me lately about resources for getting up to speed on Unicode in Delphi. I’ve sent the same set of links a few times, so I thought I should also share them here:

Pawel shared some links back mid-last year, including a three parter that Nick wrote on the topic.
Cary Jensen wrote a White Paper titled Delphi Unicode Migration for Mere Mortals: Stories and Advice from the Front Lines
Marco Cantù also allowed us to publish an extract from his Delphi 2009 Handbook on Delphi and Unicode.
Update : Note also the additional links in the comments from Jeroen and Dr Bob.

Virtual Reality in Delphi with Forum8

vrDelphi

I spent the morning at Forum8’s Design Festival in Tokyo a couple of days ago. Forum8 build Virtual Reality solutions, mostly it seems for construction, automotive and railway design, traffic and emergency simulation. A couple of hundred of their customers were at the event, sharing the solutions they’d built on Forum8’s technology and getting a look at what Forum8 have coming in the new versions.

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, Forum8’s VR engine and application is written in Delphi, and the SDK that their customers and partners can use to customise the VR solutions is also based on Delphi. There were a number of structural and automotive engineers and designers there who’s first exposure to Delphi was by customising Forum8’s system, and it was really cool to hear how enthusiastic they were about it and what else they can do with Delphi in general. Read On…

VersionInsight, Delphi and C++Builder XE SVN integration, is open source

svninteg_large

As has been mentioned a few times during the RAD Studio launch events, we’re releasing the Subversion implementation of the Delphi and C++Builder XE VersionInsight API to open source, both to allow people to extend it, but also to serve as an example on how to implement the API for other version control tools.

Read On…

Debugging Initialization and Finalization sections

There was a discussion on the ADUG list recently about Initialization sections. During the discussion I mentioned a technique for stepping through all the Initialization and Finalization sections in your project.

Afterward, I got a few emails from people saying they had not heard of it before, so I thought I’d do up a short video to show how it works. Read On…

C++Builder Developer’s Journal – CB2010 Special Issue free

The C++Builder Developer’s Journal have made their latest issue free and open to everyone to download. It focuses on more recent features that maybe people haven’t had time to play with, and includes articles on Datasnap 2010 by Bob Swart, Unicode migration by Josh Kelley, changing the default C++Builder directory by Curtis Krauskopf, multi-touch by ByeongCheol Nam and Ki-Tae Bae, and porting from BCB6 to CB2010 by Curtis Krauskopf

The CDJ guys put a significant amount of work into each issue, so if any of the above grab your interest please go and show your support by downloading the issue.

You can find it here http://bcbjournal.org/?loc=special or here http://cc.embarcadero.com/item/27769

Delphiday.com – Daily deals on Delphi tools and components

Glenn Crouch from ESB Consultancy just posted about this on the ADUG list. It’s basically a “deal of the day”-type site for Delphi-related tools and components. Right at the moment it has LMD DockingPack at 50% off (for the next few hours anyway). Seems to have a few different vendors promoting their products on it. Worth keeping an eye on I think.

Marco Cantù’s Free RESTful Web Services in Delphi webinar at an Asia-friendly time

Marco Cantù is presenting a webinar on building RESTful clients and servers in Delphi and RAD Studio, at the Asia-friendly time of 3pm AEDT on Thursday the 4th of March. More details here

C++Builder Developer’s Journal – Call for Papers out for May 2010 issue

The C++Builder Developer’s Journal is a great magazine run by some really dedicated guys. I’ve been a subscriber for quite awhile and find it almost always has a couple of articles I’m interested in. They are very often applicable to Delphi as well. Anyway, the May 2010 issue will be an open one, meaning it will be freely available to anyone, not just subscribers. They are running a Call for Papers right now, so if you’ve had an idea for an article burning away in the back of your mind, or just like the idea of the fame and fortune that comes with being a published author (yes, I kept a straight face while typing that. Getting good at this, aren’t I?) go and check it out.

Searching in Delphi Part 1 : Regular Expressions

Being able to find elements in your code quickly and easily is critical to being productive in any IDE. Spend too long looking for things and you start to lose your train of thought. Over the years Delphi has introduced lots of different ways to search your code, some of them simple text-based matching, some of them much more capable search engines that actually understand the structure of your code. However, I regularly meet developers who aren’t aware of many of them, beyond doing a simple search using the Search | Find (Ctrl-F) menu option, or the same across multiple files using Search | Find in Files (Shift-Ctrl-F).