I previously mentioned the idea of a "living readme" here and have since been in a blog comment dialog wondering if it would be helpful for us to talk about, blog or otherwise recognize bugs in the product even if we didn't have a fix. Well, Chris Hesik has gone one step further and essentially done just that with a post about a debugger bug in Delphi 2005. I can't wait to see the response to Chris' post. I'd love to know what you think of this, let me know!

I was talking to Allen today and asking if he thought it might actually be useful if we were to make some sort of public acknowledgement of perhaps a few of the most talked about bugs from the newsgroups even in the case where we may not be able to ship a patch or update to correct the problem because of scheduling/testing/business conditions/development costs/integration issues etc. The idea being that at least people would know that we're "dialed in" and aware of an issue that affects a good number of our users (I'm not talking about "small" stuff here). Basically, I'm talking about a "living readme.txt" if you will.

What do you think, would this help even if a patch/fix weren't forthcoming?

I understand that the point of a rant really isn't to provide useful information but instead to vent some anger to a group of people who, hopefully, can share your pain in some meaningful way. However, if ever you are inclined to post a rant if you could keep the following in mind it might help your fellow trenchmates who take the time to read your rantings to actually help you out.

• Focus only on the facts as you know them
• Be as specific as possible about what the problem is and how you got there
• If there is an error message involved post the complete text of the error
• Try not to embellish or if you have to try to be conservative
• Avoid name calling
• At the end, state that you feel better, I know it'll be hard to do, but that way people will know you're ready to move on and actually be open to offers for help

If you can't seem to do any of the above you might want to save yourself the typing and utilize whatever your favorite release mechanism is not related to a computer.

That's all I can think of for now, if I come up with anything else I'll add on as necessary.

I know this issue has been pretty well discussed but someone recently asked me about it again and I put together a small example to help illustrate the problems that arise when using the MSHTML control and trying to preserve source code.

Here is what we hand the MSHTML control

we get this back (without editing anything btw):

Now, to point out the differences...

1. All tags are now uppercase
2. runat="server" on title tag is gone
3. Missing the first closing (notice the last one is preserved)
4. A single space was added between "two" and
5. The wrapped text has been unwrapped
6. The order of the table tag attributes has been reversed
7. The quotes around the table tag attribues have been removed
8. The case of the table tag attributes has been changed
9. TBODY tag has been added
10. A closing TR tag has been added (but no closing TD??)
11. All whitespace has been removed (except of course where it was added see above)

So, as you can see when it comes to source preservation using the MSHTML control we definately have our work cut out for us thus we currently reformat the markup to make it readable again. I'll have more on this later.

Recently, this bug report was brought to my attention. Unfortunately, I'd fixed this bug a long time ago but the fix never made it into Delphi 2005 VCL/VCL.NET.

I've posted a fix for this problem here. I'll be sure to get this checked in. :)

In light of the recent developments surrounding the end of Mainstream support for Visual Basic I've decided to add this entry to my blog so I can list resources for developers looking to convert from VB to Delphi. I'll keep this entry "open" so that as I find things or as people point them out to me I'll add them here. To kick things off I'll name a few of the features in the IDE that were designed to make it easier for any Visual Basic/Visual Studio developer to start using Delphi.

• Probably the most important would be the VB keybinding which you can set from the Editor Options page of the Tools|Options dialog.
• Next, is the Visual Studio syntax highlighting colors (also available from the Tools|Options dialog)
• Delphi 7 and later also have Object Inspector (Properties window) color settings that match Visual Studio which you can select from the Tools|Options dialog.
• Delphi also has a set of "VB-like" functions available in the StrUtils.pas file including things like LeftStr, RightStr, MidStr and several others.

Here are a few more resources:

• Here are a set of some rather old Windows help files that contain a bunch of information developed to help the VB user to learn Delphi
• Here is a link to a Google search on "Convert VB to Delphi"
• Delphi for Visual Basic developers
• VB to Delphi converter (btw, this is not a product endorsement I've never used this product)
• A QC bug for people to vote for VB functions in Delphi.
• Why Delphi??

Ok, that gets us started. If you have more suggestions please leave a comment and I'll add things to this entry as necessary. Removed the link to Delphi wiki's VB page as it is now blank. Added "Why Delphi??" link.

I'd like to try to found out what people dis/like about the Welcome page included with Delphi 2005. We spent quite of bit of time redesigning it for this release and I'm curious to know if people find it useful. Feel free to post comments either way but if you dislike the page please include at least a few examples of what you don't like. For those of you just looking for a way to turn it off altogether we got that, how about telling us what would be useful enough for you to keep it around?? Btw, has anyone logged that request in QualityCentral?

Be sure to take a look at these posts as well:

• How to change the items in the Headline combobox on Delphi Welcome page
• How to display more than 10 RSS entries on the Delphi 2005 Welcome page
• Adding your favorite links to the Delphi 2005 Welcome page
• Adding Delphi developer blogs to the Welcome page

Thanks!