New Job

For some good reasons, I quit my old job and joined new office. I will be working as .NET programmer here. Very few companies use Delphi in Nepal, and this one is also not an exception. I am pretty sure that I will be using C# as primary language. But I won't miss a chance of making use of Delphi . As I've already started working, I was assigned to ASP.NET project. I always prefer web programming in .NET, rather than Winform application development. It is not that I am refusing to work in Winform application, but .NET is more fun with ASP.NET.

Reporting with RAVE

If you don't know what is RAVE, it is a default reporting tool for Delphi. Delphi used to have Quick Report but Borland choose RAVE as default reporting tool. The main reason for choosing it over other is, it is written using cross platform components (CLX). Also, RAVE offer some good features like mirroring, global page, etc. I am currently working on a medium size project in Delphi and I need to build couple of reports for it. I have never used RAVE before but read and heard lot about it. I decided to give it a try. After reading some tutorials in BDN site, I started working on it. With my previous experience with Crystal Report, I found that RAVE handles reporting completely different way. Designer is easy to use and concept of generating report is cool. One can create report and save it as external file. Also, it can be embedded into application. Even further, report can be saved and extracted from database. Cool, isn't it? From my experience, I think learning RAVE is little difficult, but once you know how to do things, you have total control of report. What I miss about this great tool is, documentation. Every piece of software needs good documentation and RAVE is not an exception. If it offers so many nice things, they must be documented. With RAVE Scripting, I am still lost. Although there is a news group for supporting RAVE user, I didn't find it quite helpful.