This may be old news to some of you, but I just came across a paper titled Simple Application Framework for VCL by DevExpress. DevExpress has some killer third-party products, including the QuantumGrid. They offer support on a variety of platforms and languages, including Delphi, Kylix, ActiveX, and .NET. Their components work very well, are well-designed, and add pizazz to your application. This paper covers some best practices for Delphi application development. However, if you're a .NET guy, they have a version of the paper for .NET, too.

Andreas Hausladen came up with a way to get D8 apps to run under Mono. For more information, check out this file from SourceForge.

A couple of people have asked me to write up some more in-depth material on interfaces. I like that idea, and will do it at some point. Until then, here are a few links that I came across that cover the ins and outs of interfaces.

'Interfaces: Off the Beaten Track' by Malcolm Groves
'Code Reuse Through Interfaces' by Rob Collins
Joanna Carter's articles 'Hairier Parrots' and 'The All Seeing Eye'

If you know of other URLs, comment here and I'll roll them up to this post.

I'm sure everyone uses version control on their projects. Version control is useful even in one-person teams. If you're not using version control, then maybe I just found Pet Peeve #3.

When using version control it is imperative that you actually check code in that at least compiles. If it doesn't compile, that means that there is zero chance that you tested it. Not only does it mess up the whole build process, but if you didn't test the code, you'll most likely end up doing another build to fix the build you just got done releasing. I don't care how busy you are, or what kind of excuse you can come up with, there is NO excuse for checking code in that doesn't compile. This also leads to another blog on unit testing and automated testing, but I'll leave that for another day. Now I have to go back and finish fixing the build....

OK, time to start my list of pet peeves. When you write code that results in a hint or warning, don't treat it as a congratulations message that everything is going well. Instead, take the time out NOW to stop and fix the hint or warning. If you start getting sloppy and letting hints and warnings go, then you will inevitably get burned later on as a result of this. One perfect example of this was a project that had hundreds of hints and warnings accumulate over the years. One day, a hard to reproduce access violation got reported. Since we didn't have a test case, we had to walk through the code by hand. Finally, I noticed that a variable could possibly not be assigned in one code path. I then actually said out loud "That's funny. I would have thought a warning would have been generated." In response, the developer said "Could be. I don't know. I turned off hints and warnings because there were so many of them." We turned them back on, and sure enough, there was the warning that I expected. We fixed the code, the warning went away, and so did the AV. Shortly afterwards, we took the time to clean up all of the hints and warnings. Heaven knows how many more potential bugs we avoided by cleaning those up. Hopefully, you can learn from this mistake by just reading this. It's a lot less painful than the alternative.

Hallvard Vassbotn has started blogging. Long overdue, IMO. Delphi programmers would be insane not to keep up with his blog as just about every single thing he posts to the newsgroups is pure gold.

If you were affected by the "persistent field size mismatch exception" introduced in Delphi 7.1, then take a look at the new public beta that Borland released.

I fully believe that having a way to automate your builds is the only way to guarantee good results when building your product. The more complex your project becomes, the more complex your build becomes. This is a bad thing for several reasons, the 2 foremost being that the build becomes time-consuming and error-prone due to manual interaction. Of course, the corollary is that when you get to that stage, there is typically only one (maybe 2) person(s) that understand how to do a full build of your product. Using an automated build tool can help the entire team and the quality of your product immensely.

I have spear-headed the effort to automate builds several times now. Sometimes, it is met with resistance. Sometimes, it is encouraged. But in every case, when the build is automated the end-result blows people away. Comments like "Wow, doing a build is that easy?" are frequently heard. After getting an automated build into your organization, people start seeing many other opportunities to fine-tune the build. "Oooh, wouldn't it be nice if we could schedule this to run at midnight every night?" or "Let's have the build run the test scripts automatically for us" or "Hey, we can add this other utility into the build process to ensure that datasets are closed at design-time!". The results are always well worth the effort. At one company, I took a completely manual build from 4 hours down to double-clicking and 45 minutes. The added benefit of not forgetting steps also made the build more reliable the first time. I imagine results like these are more common than not.

There are several tools out there, and here's my simple list of tools that I find useful. All of them are extensible in the sense that you can create your own actions and have those actions execute whatever you want during the build. In my opinion, that is the absolute best part of creating the build script!

Product	Language	Notes
FinalBuilder	Multiple (Delphi, BCB, VS.NET)	Commercial, but absolutely fantastic
Ant	Java	Open Source
NAnt	.NET	Open Source. Knock-off of Ant

Even if you end up crufting your own automated make together with BAT files and make, it's worth it. So quit standing on the sidelines and get cracking! If you know of other build tools that you find useful, please leave a comment and I'll update the main page.