Are you the Delphi developer we're looking for..? :)

Despite the lack of new posts in this blog, we are very much alive and kicking. Many exciting things have been going on with our company (Infront ASA) - and now we're looking to expand our Delphi development team in Oslo.

Click here to go to the position description

You'll find general info about our company here: Infront Careers

Our main product - the Infront Professional Terminal is described here. 

You will be working on one of the best terminals for financial information and trading in the world - competing head-to-head with the likes of Bloomberg and Refinitiv (née Thomson Reuters). We have a small, but very effective team with some of the most experienced Delphi developers in the world.

Besides having fun kicking the competition, we're having fun Hackathons as well - here is the video we made for the Infront Time Machine.

So what you are you waiting for - if you're a great Delphi developer - send us an application and your CV! :-) 

Why no blogging? Alive and kicking :-)

As you may have noticed (or not :), this Blog has been silent since 2008. Several people have asked me recently why I'm not blogging anymore - here is a short explanation.

I was blogging quite actively for a while, but other priorities in my life (family, work, new house, exercising etc) have taken over. There is only so much time.

While I've been silent on the blog for a few years now, I'm still programming in Delphi professionally and I follow the community closely. At work, we have until now decided to stay with Delphi 2007, and I've been lagging behind on digging down into the low-level technical details of newest versions and features.

So there has been less to blog about. Now we're in the process of upgrading to XE2 - and there are regularly issues and points of interest that might spark my interest into blogging again - we'll see....

Also there are many, really good Delphi blogs now - I see less "holes" that needs to be discussed. If I blog, I don't want to blog about topics that others cover well, anyway :-).

Delphi programmers wanted!

Our company, Infront AS,  is growing fast - both in terms of customers, revenue and employees. We're in the process of expanding our Client Development Team with one or two new persons.

The Company:

• ~20 persons
• Fast growing, making profit
• Realtime financial information and online trading
• Customers: brokers, banks, institutions, day traders

The Job:

• Tools: Delphi, Subversion, FogBugz, ScrumWorks
• ~1 million LOC Win32 GUI client
• Competitive conditions
• Current: Win32, ActiveX, ISAPI, HTML, XML
• Future: Win64, .NET, Silverlight, Ajax, Flash

You:

• Live in or nearby Oslo (or can move here)
• Speak, read and write English fluently
• Experienced developer, Delphi knowledge is a plus, but not an absolute requirement
• Work efficiently in a team

From our website:

"Our highly qualified team of developers are looking for new colleagues. If you are an experienced developer looking for a challenging position in an informal organization we would very much like to hear from you.

Working at Infront

Infront develops and sells a highly technically advanced software systems for real-time market data and exchange trading, where the combined competence and innovative ability of the employees to solve complex problems is of the greatest value. At Infront, you have the chance to work in an environment where the majority of employees have a high level of education, specialized competence and experience. "

The details about the positions are available here (in Norwegian) and here (in English).

Don't hesitate to send us an email with your resume if you qualify - or tips other people that might be interested! You can also email me at vassbotn [at] infront.no.

Testing WLW Maps

I've just updated to WLW 1.0 beta 2. It has a number of nice (new and old) features. Last time I tried the Insert Map feature crashed the application, so now I'm going to try again.

To avoid attracting stalkers, I will not post a map of my home, but rather the place where I work, Infront AS:

View map

I can't directly upload images to my Blogger.com account, but I don't know if that is why the Insert Map feature only inserts the "View map" link above. It was easy enough the find the relevant place, although it didn't understand all the addresses I tried.

And it was horriedly slow after I pressed Insert - I thought I had to kill WLW for a while there... ;)

So now you know where I work. Right now its raining, but there is going to be a big, free concert right outside our windows now in about an hour. My daughter (12) is going to join me to see the show - featuring numerous pop- and rock stars (mostly Norwegian). Let's hope the rain slows down by then... ;)

Use the full FastMM! Consider donating!

A few years ago, it would be interesting to ask what memory manager (MM) you are using in your Delphi projects. You had the old-in-the-tooth in-the-box 32-bit Delphi RTM MM that was the default MM in Delphi 2 through Delphi 7, simple wrappers around Win32 API HeapAlloc, freeware alternatives such as MultiMM, RecyclerMM, PSD, AAHpDeFr, Bucket, and commercial alternatives such as SmartHeap, Nexus MM and BigBrain.

The winner takes it all

Then (after many rounds in the FastCode newsgroups), Pierre le Riche's FastMM appeared as the winner - it is the best memory manager overall. It is a tricky balancing act of trying to achieve high performance, low memory usage, low fragmentation, good multi-thread performance, good multi-processor performance, and working well with all kinds of application behavior profiles. Batch programs, services, GUI programs, databases and web servers all have very different memory usage needs - a good memory manager needs to work well with all of them.

In most cases FastMM will be the best solution - and if not the best, it will be very close. As you know by now FastMM4 is the default MM in both Delphi 2006 and Delphi 2007. That is, it is a slightly reduced version that does not have the extended debug features that is available in the full version that you can download for free here. With the right defines in the FastMM4Options.inc file you can get full stack trace for memory leaks, detection of heap corruption, using freed blocks, calling virtual methods of freed objects, double frees and so on. If you are serious about finding and fixing problems in your projects early, you should use the full version with the debug options turned on during development and alpha testing.

Donations

We have been doing so for some time for our own products now - that's why I decided it was about time to give a little token of our appreciation back to Pierre. We used  the FastMM donation page on SourceForge to donate a symbolic amount - it is by no means proportional to the benefit we get from FastMM or the amount of work Pierre has put down, but hopefully it gives Pierre a good feeling ;).

I encourage each one of you to consider to do the same - at least after you have started to use FastMM and see the major benefits it gives.

You can make your donation here.

Nordic Delphi meetup groups

Last week I had a very nice meeting and dinner with DevCo’s Nordic representatives Fredrik Haglund (Developer Relations and Evangelist) and Dan Nygren (Account Manager). We had some interesting discussions about everything from nuclear power plants to Delphi and DevCo. These guys are very dedicated and on a mission to make DevCo and Delphi succeed even better than under the Borland umbrella.

One of their goals is to encourage the formation of more technical (and less marketing-speak driven) meetings with and between local Delphi developers in cities throughout the Nordic area. Fredrik has already started a Delphi meetup.com group for Stockholm – they have their next meeting September 14th. In Gothenburg, Magnus Flysjö is running another Delphi group that will have their next meeting September 1st.

As far as I know there are no active Delphi meeting groups in Oslo (or Norway?) for the time being. There has been the (give or take) annual official Delphi launch meetings, but no user-driven events. Once upon a long time ago, there was a smartly named group – NoBUG (for Norwegian Borland User Group) – with their own Usenet group (no.org.nobug.diverse). It was pioneered by our own CTO, Morten Lindeman. To quote from the bottom of this page:

“NoBUG
The Norwegian Borland User Group recently announced their formation on several newsgroups. Their aim is to promote and support the Norwegian community of Borland product users. In addition to Borland C++, the group covers Pascal, Delphi, OWL etc. For more information, send an email request to: nobug__at__falcon.no”

Alas, it ceased to exist several years ago. If there is enough interest, I’ll be glad to contribute to a new Delphi meetup group in Oslo. You can state your interest in a comment here, or even better by indicating your interest at meetup.com. Now with the upcoming free and inexpensive Turbo Delphi Explorer and Pro versions, it should be easier to get hobbyists and students interested, too.

A quick search reveals that there is some activity to try and start a group in Bergen (by Tom Reiertsen). He has registered the domain ndug.no (Norwegian Delphi User Group). Great initiative, Tom!

Book review: The Pragmatic Programmer

After finishing tech editing and reviewing Jon Shemitz’ excellent upcoming .NET 2.0 for Delphi programmers, I’ve got some more spare time to write blog articles and to read. Thanks to David Cummins and Pearson Publishing Group, we at Infront now have a small library of high-quality tech books, ranging from C# and .NET, to C++, security, hacking, methodology, science and more (the Delphi side we already had covered).

I often find myself reading two or thee books in parallel, but one of the first books I finished was Andrew Hunt and David Thomas’ already legendary book The Pragmatic Programmer. As the title indicates, this is a very pragmatic book, for programmers that want to keep improving their work. In contrast to so many other methodology books that wants to force you to follow a specific model of requirements gathering, specifications, design, coding, testing and deployment, this book drops all the self-righteous fluff. In many ways the advice in the book follows the now popular trends of eXtreme Programming and an Agile development process.

A few of the key concepts or advice in the book are:

• DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself – don’t duplicate code, logic, structure, documentation etc. Use code generation techniques where needed to mechanically generate files from a common master-template (for instance, generate a C++ header file, a Delphi import unit and HTML documentation from a single common template).
  
• Understand the lower-level subsystems you talk to and depend on. Don’t use wizards that generate code unless you know how that code works. Don’t depend on mysterious magic. Know what you are doing.
  
• Focus on algorithmic performance, not micro-optimizations. Know how to estimate Big-Oh performance of an algorithm.
  
• Use and know productive tools such as IDEs, source control, bug and requirements tracking, testing frameworks etc.

The book covers much more ground that this, keeping an easy to read, approachable and down-to-earth style. It reinforced some of our existing work habits, reminded us about things we could do better and gave us a few tips for future exploration and experimentation to try and improve our development process.

This book is highly recommended!

Recordings of 24h of DeXter

The recordings of the 24 hours of Dexter sessions are now available in streaming and downloadable mp3 formats. There is a ton of interesting high-quality technical listen material here.

Not totally unbiased, I must recommend my own session where I talk about two samples that will most likely be included on the Delphi 2006 CD (a Delphi7 compatible memory manager, and a TComplex record with operator overloading for Win32), Jon Shemitz' upcoming classic .NET for Delphi programmers book (where I am the technical editor and may end up contributing an Appendix on the Delphi language), and our great products at Infront AS, including The Online Trader™, X-Quote™ and WebBroker On Steroids based WebQuote™ engine.

Other recommended sessions (I haven't heard them all yet) are:

Danny Thorpe - "Danny details the new Delphi compiler enhancements in DeXter, such as records with methods and operator overloading in Win32, and improved function inlining."

Allen Bauer - "Allen discusses the new features of the DeXter IDE."

Pierre Le Riche & John O'Harrow - "Pierre talks about the new memory manager in DeXter. He discusses backward compatibility, the new features, as well as the differences in behavior between the old and new memory managers. He will also give a technical insight into the inner workings of the new memory manager. John discusses the Fastcode project: What it is, who it is, the history behind it, and the contribution that it has made (and continues to make) to Delphi and the Delphi developer community. He also mentions some of the improved runtime library functions that were developed by the Fastcode project and are now incorporated into DeXter."

Chris Hesik & Alastair Fyfe - "Chris and Alastair cover all that is new, improved and cool about the Integrated Debugger for Dexter, including features for both native and managed debugging. They also discuss what C++Builder 6 users can expect from the debugger when moving to Dexter."

But by all means, do check out the other sessions - I'm sure you'll find your own favourites. 
     
During the interview and live chat I got some questions about where my "stuff and tools" can be downloaded. I might blog more about some of these items later, but you can browse and download several of my tools from Borland's excellent CodeCentral repository.

I'd also recommend reading my The Delphi Magazine articles, including the one in issue 82 about the WOS (WebBroker On Steroids) framework. If you haven't already, do yourself a favour and order the CD with all the back issues - a real gold mine of high-quality information. Most of my articles come with source that can be downloaded for free here.

Let me know if there is any of this stuff you'd like me to blog about.

Rocket Scientist wanted!

Our company are looking for the best Delphi and C++ programmers out there. From our website: "Our highly qualified team of developers are looking for new colleagues. If you are an experienced developer looking for a challenging position in an informal organization we would very much like to hear from you." The details about the positions are available here (in Norwegian): "Rocket Scientist" - Borland Delphi / C/C++ So send us an email with your resumé - or tips your favorite Delphi or C++ guru... :) Updated: The job advert is now available in English: http://www.infront.no/pdf/jobad_programmer.pdf

The Delphi 2005 launch in Oslo was a blast!

More than 140 people showed up for a breath-taking demonstration of some of the great new features of Delphi 2005 (yes, that is the official product name). Jason Vokes covered the IDE, Unit tests integration, Error Insight, Help Insight, SyncEdit, Refactoring, ASP.NET, Borland Data Providers, and much more. Henrik Jondell demonstrated ECO II, Database reversing, Model driven development and more.

Yours truly got 15 minutes to show some slides on me, Infront AS, how we use Delphi, the most productivity enhancing new Delphi features and what's new in the Delphi language for D8, D2005 Win32, D2005 .NET and in the future.

You can download my slides and some of the demo code I didn't have time to show here: http://cc.borland.com/ccWeb.exe/listing?id=22630.

John Kaster has uploaded his BorCon Delphi 2005 slides here: http://cc.borland.com/ccWeb.exe/listing?id=22324

They contain much more detail and cover much more ground (this is were I got some of the future language stuff) - recommended!