First impression of Delphi 2005

Last week, I downloaded trial version of Delphi 2005 and played little bit. I must say, this is the version of Delphi everybody was waiting for long time. With multiple personality, it supports Delphi.NET, Win32 application and even C#. I was only able to explore ASP.NET part of it and everything work fine. I opened my Delphi 8 project 'worklog application' in Delphi 2005 and compiled. No problem! everything went smoothly. Also, tried opening and compiling my old Delphi 7 Win32 project in it. Worked find. I even tried refactoring tool in this project. Greate feature! Again, opened C# project written in C# Builder. Worked fine again! What to say now? I read few post about bugs in Delphi 2005 but couldn't reporduced any of them in my machine. I need to explore so many things in this version. Let's see how many bugs I will find. ;-)

Size does matter

Size may not matter everywhere but when it comes to application file size, it does matter. I was working on a small encryption routine for my pet project. I decided to put this routine in an assembly so that it can be used for other application also. The assembly is to be written in C# language and development tool was Borland C# Builder. Simply, I created a project in C# Builder and added 2 .cs files, wrote a code and compiled it. The resulting assembly (.DLL) file was 7.5 KB big. Simple! Worked everything fine. Now something came to my mind and I fired up MS Visual Studio.NET. Created a project and added those 2 .cs files to it. Compiled it. Now what I saw was really surprising. This time assembly was about 20 KB big. I double checked everthing in both dev. tool for file count. Both projects had 2 .cs files. Now, can somebody tell me what is happening? Why VS.NET is producing bigger file than C# Builder? I am still confused !

What's new in Delphi 2005

Bob Swart wrote article about Delphi 2005 new features, including IDE and compiler enhanchment.

Error handling in ASP.NET

I've been doing some research on error handling in ASP.NET. All I wanted to show error detail in custom page instead of giving user Microsoft's ugly page. The sample code I found was using VB.NET, another ugly thing. In VB, there is some thing called shared class, which can not be implemeted in C# or Delphi. Using this shared class, whole exception can be passed to custom page, but it is no use for me. Then I found a sample code, which is also in VB, but gave me clue how to achieve things I wanted for long. I used HttpContext.Current.Response.Write() method to give output. So, I wrote a library to handle all the errors generated in my application. Written completely using Borland's C# Builder, this library can be used with other ASP.NET application. I am planning to write an article on error handling and post it to codeproject.com along with source code of library.