Live From the Diamondback Preview

Live From the Diamondback Preview! (From Nick's Delphi Blog)

We are live a the the Diamondback Preview!

Michael Swindell just announce the Kylix Community program which will be updating the Kylix CLX library, etc.? Sounds pretty good.?

Michael just announce the 2004 Spirit of Delphi award and the winner is.... me!? I am totally humbled and honored.? Thanks to Borland and everyone for thinking of me.? I really appreciate it. Seriously, that means a lot.? Thank you.? I'm really humbled and honored.

Michael is now talking about the stuff in Diamondback.?

• Refactoring, ECO for ASP.NET
• New ASP.NET Web Controls
• DBWeb controls are ECO enabled.
• New HTML designer features.
• dbGo for .Net
• Delphi Advantage for ADO.NET
  • Create tables, edit tables, etc in the Data Explorer
• Team ALM productivity
  • Fully integrated StarTeam into the IDE

Michael is bringing up Danny to do the compiler/language stuff.

Danny's Stuff:

• Function inlining to improve performance.
• Can do things above and beyond what the .Net JITer does
• Diamondback now supports multi-unit namespaces.
• There is the for..in language contruct (Equal to the foreach in C#)

Allen Bauer is now at the podium:

• He's showing how the VCL.NET designer can be the good old fashioned floating designer that we all know and love and how the designer works just like we remember.
• Allen's pointing out that they have “ripped off“ a bunch of stuff from JBuilder.? For instance, SyncEdit.? It allows you to select a bunch of code, and change all the common symbols in the code, i.e. you make a change in one place, and all the symbols are change where you selected.
• He's showing the History function, which is sort of like a simple, local version control system.? You can save as many copies of of a file as you need on disk, and the IDE will manage that for you, including source code diffs and what not. Very cool.

Now Ramesh is up to show the ADO.NET/BDP improvements.

• Designer enhancements: Select StoredProcedures, automatic StoredProcedure parameter population, Table mapping support.
• You can do schema/table creation in the IDE, copy table data from one location to another with bdpCopy, you can edit/alter tables and views as well, right from the DataExplorer
• There's a new component called the DataHub that appears to aggregate data from multiple sources, and there is a DataSync component that will manage all the updates for you.? It's a conduit between the dataset and your changes to the data.

Next up is Chris Hesik to do debugging stuff:

• Chris was in the hospital and came in to demo for us.? What?a trooper!
• The biggest feature was to meld the Win32 and .Net debuggers together so that you can debug both together.
• He's got a project group with a Delphi for .Net, Delphi for Win32, and C# projects.? He's setting a breakpoint in each project, and is hitting each of the breakpoints, all at the same time.? He's debugging a Win32 and a .Net process at the same time.
• Each of the items in the stack frame now have local variable information. If? you select an item in the stack view, you get its local variable
• Breakpoint view is nicer -- can enable/disable breakpoint with checkboxes and inplace editing for variable breakpoints.
• There is IL and native assembly in the CPU view
• You have the choice to break or not break on a given exception.? You can even ignore an exception, and the next time that exception is raised, it will continue to be ignored.? That's a very nice feature.

Next up are the ECO guys, including Malcom Groves:

• You know, I don't totally understand the ECO stuff, but it sure looks cool.? I understand the big picture - that you can design classes that are persistent -- but exactly how that works in ECO isn't clear to me...
• They are now “back-tracking“ the Northwind Database into ECO.? That's pretty cool.

Mark Edington is up next.? (Have I mentioned that Mark is just a really smart, really nice guy?)? He's talking about Unit Testing.? This is pretty hot stuff, folks.? There are wizards that will automatically build test cases for your classes.? It's all done automatically, so all you have to do is write the actual tests and nothing more.? Very, very nice.? If you aren't doing Unit Testing, you need to start doing it. My only beef? It defaults to using _Result as? the result variable for a test.? Doesn't everyone know that underscores are the Spawn of Satan?

John Sileski? is going to demo StarTeam integration.? I personally am pretty excited about this. I love StarTeam, and am really looking forward to a tight integration between the IDE and StarTeam.

Jim Tierney is up showing the new Web Deployment Manager.? This is a really neat feature, and very useful.? You can easily deploy an ASP.NET application to any network or FTP location. In addition, the ASP.NET Project Manager will show all the files in the directory of a project, as ASP.NET projects are very file based. It's a nice feature.

Finally, Corbin Dunn is up.? Corbin is another really, really nice, super smart guy.

• He's showing off refactoring.? This is really nice, too, folks.? You can extract methods, rename variables (across the entire project), extract resourcestrings, automatically declare variables, and find the unit of a given declaration and add it to your uses clause.
• He is showing HelpInsight, where a “help hint“ pops up for identifiers when you hover the mouse over an identifier

That's it.? If you aren't fired up for Diamondback, I personally think you don't have a pulse.? ;-)

And here's why you should have come to Borcon -- they are giving all of us a CD with the Preview version of Diamondback on it.? Don't you wish you were here?? ;-)