Some useful tools for Delphi developers

I was always fascinated by the tools that are available to .NET developers which help to increase the productivity, like unit testing framework (NUnit), documenation tool and automated build tool (NANT). So, I started looking for same for Delphi. Starting with the documentation tool, I tried few applications but not so promising. Lastly I found DelphiCodeToDoc and it worked well for me. Though there are few bugs, but the tool is great and it supports JavaDoc style documentation. Again, I found that the author of this application is offering a template for GExperts. Tried that and worked well. Next target was unit testing framework. The only one framework I found was DUnit. Also tried this tool and worked very well for me. Finally, I started searching for automated build tool for Delphi application. The one I tried was WANT. Due to the poor documentation, I was forced to learn the whole building process from ANT website and looking into WANT's own build script. In a few hours, I was able to write a script to build my first test application including unit test with DUnit. Super cool. Somebody said "Sky is the limit". Very true. Since my last unit test used GUIRunner, I wanted to try something with console. Could not find a clue how to do that. Well, after going through the build script of WANT again and again, I noticed that we need to create a DLL version of test application. Tried it and worked well. I will try explain this process in detail in my next post.

Celebrating new year

Believe it or not, we are in the year 2065 here in Nepal. If you do not know, we have our own calendar. I've been planning a vacation for new year for a long time. I wanted to go outside valley in last December but my son was sick that time. So, I did not want to miss our new year this time and made a plan. Our new year was on the 13th of April and we went to Godavari Village Resort to relax. Since we were going with the kid, I did not wanted to go far from the city. The resort is just 7 KM away and very peaceful. I can't explain how much I enjoyed with my family there. My wife and I decided to make a plan for such short trip for every new year (either in English or in Nepali year). Let's see how it goes.

Constitutional Assembly Election in Nepal

Today is the biggest day in the history of Nepal. Today, we are having an election for Constitutional Assembly for the first time. This election will select the group of people who will be responsible to write the new constitution of Nepal. Everybody is hoping for stable political situation and long lasting peace in the country after this election. Till now, everything is going well, except for few minor incidents in the remote part of the country. Also, I cast a vote today for the first time in my life. :-)

New Delphi Magazine

This is good news to all Delphi developers that there is a new magazine about Delphi, "Blaise Pascal". The printed version costs around 40 euro per year. But you can get the download version for FREE. However, you need to pay for the code or program if you decide to go for free version. I am taking this as a good news because I still remember closing down of Delphi magazine last year. I started thinking that nobody uses Delphi anymore but with this magazine (and other development), I already started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

Back again

I don't believe that it's been almost 7 months since my last post here. Anyway, lot of things happened in 7 months of time. During this time, I was given more responsibilities in the office. I am now part of a team which is responsible for auditing CMMI implementation. Also, I joined EMBA and my classes started from Feb 17th. We created a group in Google to share information regarding course materials and other stuffs. I am the manager of that group. After joining EMBA, I am feeling young again :-). I remember my collage day and enjoying a lot with new friends there. Most importantly, I now don't have time to watch TV or movies. I have to attend the classes on Saturdays. Although we also have classes on Sundays, it's only in the evening. Thank God. I did not have enough time to spend on photography, so I decided to sell my camera. I will probably save some money and go for dSLR in the near future. ;-) Bought a laptop recently. Now I don't have money for new camera. Damn! These days I am totally into management business. Haven't had chance to look into technical things and feeling myself way to far from the latest development in technology. The only thing I should be focusing now is 'Time Managment'. I sometime feel guilty for not giving enough time to my family. I hope Google will help me finding something from which I can learn to manage my time efficiently.

Management Lesson: Taking charge with programmers

I've been managing various projects for more than a year. I found this article interesting and think it will help those who are in project management business. Please read on.

If you want to communicate with a programmer, you have to take charge. Programmers are a tricky bunch sometimes. But you, not the programmer, are in charge of the project. Although the programmer is in charge of a large portion work, you’re the one responsible of the project if the project fails. You must establish dominance without being too aggressive. Establish five things through your early communications:

• Leadership: Leadership is focused on motivating, aligning objectives, and moving your project team to a destination. Assume that you’re leading the project and that your project team will follow.
• Management: Management is focused on getting results. As a project manager, your core focus is on getting the project successfully completed. Management of a group of programmers means you must see results.
• Discipline: When your programmers aren’t getting their work done as promised, don’t hesitate to discipline according to your human resources guidelines. Be careful about making snap judgments, thought. First, find out why they aren’t completing the work. Were your instructions unclear? Was there a miscommunication on your end? The problem could be yours and not the programmers’.
• Organization: Your ability to communicate, lead, manage, and discipline your project team centers on your organizational skills. Be organized and your project team will respect you for having everything on the ball.
• Balance: In all your decisions you must be fair. Your team of programmers will respect you even more if you show balance and fairness in all of your work assignments and disciplinary actions. Don’t play favorites.

Multiple instances of the application

I wanted to run multiple instances of Skype but couldn't find a way to do it. Although I have polygamy patch for my MSN messenger, I couldn't find similar application to patch Skype. After searching the Internet, I came to know that there is a command line tool to run any application with different Window's user. The command is as below; runas /user: XXX application_executable For me, the solution was just adding one more user to Windows XP system(and assigning password to it too) and by firing following command; runas /user:new_user skype.exe I am not sure if this command works for other version of Windows, but it worked with my Windows XP professional. :-)

Management Lesson: The Law of Diminishing Returns

Time is time. No one can buy more time. You can buy more labor if you think it will help your team do more work faster, but that’s not the same thing as adding time to a project. The law of diminishing returns dictates that adding labor doesn’t exponentially increase productivity; in fact, at some point productivity can even go backwards. For a real-life example, consider that two hardworking and experienced programmers working on a project. In order to finish the project on time, you decide to add one more programmer. Now the programmers may be completing the code more quickly, you decide to add six more programmers so that the project can be finished even sooner. You soon realize that although adding one programmer increased your productivity, adding six more only created chaos with creating a contentious environment. You reached the point of diminishing returns when you added six programmers. Bottom line: You can’t build a house in a single day even with 100 people.

Restructuring SVN repository

Sometime you may need to restructure your SVN repository. I was in the same kind of situation. We rely on SVN and we really trust this software. But the person who created repository made a mistake. He created 3 folders, 'trunk', 'tags' and 'branches' in the hard drive and then created repo in the 'trunk' folder. We didn't notice this until we need to branch our project. After going through some websites and forums, I found the simple method to restructure the repository.
1. First, dump the repository to some file

svnadmin dump /path/to/repo > dumpfile.txt

2. Move your repository folder to somewhere else in order to backup, just in case

mv /path/to/repo /path/to/repo_backup

3. Now, manually change the "Node-path:" and "Copy-to-path:" headers to insert "trunk/" into them

sed -e 's/^\(Node-path: \)\(.*\)/\1trunk\/\2/;s/^\(Copy-from-path:\)\(.*\)/\1trunk\/\2/' dumpfile > dumpfile.new 

If you find above command too hard, just open the dumpfile in any text editor and do find and replace. :-) You should be replacing "Node-path:" with "Node-path:trunk/" and "Copy-to-path:" with "Copy-to-path:trunk/". Simple huh! 4. Create new repository

svnadmin create /path/to/repo

5. Load modified dump file into newly created repository

svnadmin load newdumpfile.txt path/to/repo

6. Finally, import 'tags' and 'branches' folder in the repository. Now, you will see your repository with proper structure in which you can make branches and tags of your project.

Distributed Version Control with SVK

Imagine a situation where some software development company has it's offices located in different part of the world. This company also has central server where the version control software is running. The connection to this server is not always good. In such situation, if each office has its own server having version control system which is a mirror of the central system, the problem due to bad connection can be reduced. For this kind of situation, SVK is the tool everybody should use. SVK allows mirroring of existing remote repositories, creating local branches, working on these branches, and when everything is ready, merging them back into mirrored trunk, which updates the remote repository automatically. I've done some research on SVK for the real world situation mentioned above. The company I am currently working has it's offices in US, India and Nepal. The central server is located in US. But sometimes, due to the problem of connection or by other factors, the main repository is not available. To overcome this problem, we looked for the alternative of making mirror of central repository in both Nepal and India. By having the repository in both locations, access to the repository is local. No more slow connection or time out problem. Since our version control is Subversion, our task was to find the tool(s) which is best suitable for this system. Also, most of the development work is done in Microsoft Windows Platform, we use TortoiseSVN to update from and commit to the repository. It was an advantage to us that SVK works on subversion file system.

Plan of implementation
In order to make SVK work, the plan is to mirror the central repository in the local machine. Then the local branch is created. Instead of using the mirrored trunk, user will be accessing this branch. At the end of the day, when everybody is done with their work, the local branch is merged into mirrored trunk. At the same time, the central repository is automatically updated.

Installing SVK
SVK is written completely in Perl and kind of pain to install. Luckily, in my Fedora Core 4 system, Subversion was already installed with perl binding, all I needed to fire the command;

perl -MCPAN -e 'install SVK'

This command install SVK and all of it's many dependencies.

Setting up local 'depotmap'
To set up local repository, the following command does the trick;

svk depotmap --init

This will create a default depotmap. Alternatively, if you want to make a depotmap to the desire location, just issue the command

svk depotmap

This will open a default text editor and let you edit the depotmap name and the location.

Mirroring the central repository

svk mirror svn://mydomain.com/myproject/trunk //localrepo/trunk

To ensure that mirror has been setup, svk mirror --list command can be used. Now that the mirror has been set up, the local copy is sync with mirror using

svk sync //localrepo/trunk

Creating a local branch
The first thing need to be done before start working is to create a local branch. Doing this is same as in Subversion.

svk cp -m "local branch" //localrepo/trunk /localrepo/localbranch

You can check the branch by issuing the following command;

svk ls //localrepo/localbranch

Now user is able to work with the local branch using TortoiseSVN or anyother Subversion client tool.

Merging from local branch to the mirror
At the end of the day, after everybody is done with the work, local branch must be merged to the mirror. This can be done with the command svk smerge command.

svk smerge -C //localrepo/localbranch //localrepo/trunk

The C option checks for the conflict that may have. Now, if there is no conflict, the actual merger can be done using following command;

svk smerge -l //localrepo/localbranch //localrepo/trunk

This command also updates the repository automatically that the mirror points to.

Google Reader

Google came up with new tool called Google Reader. It is a web base RSS feed reader. You need to have GMail account in order to use it. I used to bookmark all my fav. blog links in browser and there is no way to browse them using another machine. With Google Reader, now I can read those blog from anywhere. I think it is better than using any desktop RSS reader application. PS: Like other google tools, Google Reader is also very fast and also make use of AJAX technology.

Insert and Delete with DLinq

In my last entry, I showed how to fetched record from SQL server using LINQ. I did some more work on LINQ and was able to insert a new record and delete particular record using LINQ. In order to insert or delete, I needed to start Distributed Transaction Coordinator in my SQL server. Below is the simple code use to insert a record,

Authors aut = new Authors();

aut.AuId = id;
aut.AuFname = fName;
aut.AuLname = lName;
aut.Phone = phone;

db.Authors.Add(aut);
db.SubmitChanges();

Continuing the work I left last time, I made an object of Authors and added ID, first name, last name and phone to it. Then calling the SubmitChanges method, the actual data is written to database. Similarly, deleting a record is also not so hard.

var authors = (
    from a in db.Authors
    where a.AuId == id
    orderby a.AuFname
    select a).First();

db.Authors.Remove(authors);
db.SubmitChanges();

In order to delete a record, First method is called with the query, which returns a particular record. By passing this record to the Remove method of Authors object, a record will be deleted. With this, record deletion is only limited to memory data. Actual record will be deleted only after calling SubmitChanges method. The next step is to explore transaction in LINQ.

Linq and DLinq in action

Beta version of Visual C# 2005 Express Edition was lying around my hard disk for some times. I was stuck with a project and didn't have chance to look into it. When I visited LINQ site, I found the way to use it. I've downloaded Tech Preview version of LINQ and installed it. Integration with Visual C# 2005 was not so hard and I was already in new Linq consol application window. I found couple of doc files on 'Hands on Lab' inside 'Docs' folder. After reading a file for DLinq, I got general idea on how actually LINQ works. In order to start with DLinq, I first made a ObjectModel of 'Pubs' database using a tool 'sqlmetal.exe'. This tool is installed in Bin folder and able to create a C# source file which contains mapping of every table and column to respective objects. The resulting source was then included in Linq console application. With little modification in ObjectModel, I was able to use SqlConnection object with my 'pubs' class. By writing a code (as shown below), I was able to see the result of database immediately. The bottom line is, with LINQ, there is no need to write SQL. The query language is now integrated in programming language. I think it is easy to use and developer doesn't need to have knowledge of SQL. Till now, I have learnt to get the result from database. Now my target is to learn how to insert, update and delete records using LINQ.

using System;
using System.Collections .Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Query;
using System.Xml.XLinq;
using System.Data.DLinq;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using pubs;

namespace LINQApp
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            dbQuery();
        }

        static void dbQuery()
        {
            SqlConnection conn = 
                     new SqlConnection(@"SERVER={YourDBServer};user id={uid};password=;database=pubs;");
           
            Pubs db = new Pubs(conn);

             var authors = 
                 from  a in db.Authors
                 select a;

            foreach (var auth in authors)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(" {0} {1} | {2} | {3} ", 
                                       auth.AuFname, auth.AuLname, auth.Address, auth.Phone);
            }
           
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}

The LINQ project

This is really interesting. Microsoft has came up with the new project called LINQ (Language Integrated Query). By extending C# and VB.NET language, it provides few classes to take advantage of the database query. The real version of LINQ is targeted for C# 3.0 and is in preview state now. The downloadable tech preview version only works with VS.NET 2005 beta or Visual C# 2005 Express Edition Beta 2. Still, there are 2 more flavours of LINQ, XLinq and DLinq. Former is for using XML as a database, while latter is use for relational database. Currently, DLinq only supports MS SQL Server (no surprise) :-). I've downloaded and installed LINQ tech preview and it is working fine with my copy of Visual C# 2005 Express Edition(beta). I will be exploring it in depth in coming days. BTW, Channel 9 video in which Anders Hejlsberg explains the features of LINQ is worth watching.

Camera, Action, Go!

Well, my new camera is already in action. Here is a sample. This picture was taken at 6 this morning at my house terrace.

There are few more to watch on flickr.

Learning Photography

I don't have any hobbies except music and reading computer related stuffs. I was thinking about doing some photography but that never happen. Taking good pictures and showing them to friends was what I thought about. it's now time to learn some photography as I have upgraded my camera. I had Nikon Coolpix 2000, which is point-n-shoot kind of camera. There is nothing much to think about while taking a shot. Recently I bought Olympus C-765 Ultra Zoom. I couldn't believe that it has so many features. Even after going through it's online manual , I couldn't understand the functionality. Because I don't understand buzz words from photography world. I am very thankful to my friend Om, who explained some of the features in detail. I am now in position to get some nice shots of objects around me. In order to understand the concept of Aperture, ISO, Depth of Field etc, I tried to search the Net for resources. Among many web sites, I found Photoxels site very useful. Everything in this site is very clearly explained. After getting used to the camera, I will be uploading pics to flickr.

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.

The 24 hours of Delphi

I've been listening to '24 hours of Delphi' in BDN radio. It's already in 7th session and Deepak Shenoy is speaking now. I won't be able to listen to this live event till tomorrow morning because it is already 5:30 PM in Nepal and it's time to go home. I will definitly continue listening it after coming to office tomorrow morning.

Namespace in Delphi

I must say that namespace support in Delphi is very strange. While disassembling Delphi produced assembly with Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector, the result was surprising. At the same time, result of C# produced assembly was fine.

Also, I am really impressed with the namespace support in Chrome.