The Delphi language in 10.3 has a fairly core change in the way it allows far more flexibility in the declaration of local variables, their scope and lifetime. This is a change that breaks a key tenet of the original Pascal language, but offers a significant number of advantages, reducing unneeded code in several cases. Old Style Var Blocks  Since Turbo Pascal 1 and until now, following classic Pascal language rules, all local variable declarations had to be done in a var block written be...

A few years back, when Embarcadero started building new Delphi compilers for platforms other than Windows there was a lot of discussion how compatible the new Delphi should have been with the current language, in terms of core language features and overall perception of the language. Eventually the decision that emerged was to do keep an extremely large degree of compatibility, with a few significant and bold steps towards a language more capable of attracting a new generation of developers.  ...

Microsoft has released a new update of Windows 10, continuing with their now 6-month release cycle. The version 1809 was initially distributed, and then put on hold (twice, actually) because of issues, first with files on OneDrive and later with ZIP operations. But that’s not the point of my blog post. I have personally installed it and not experienced any issues. It appears to be a good update overall to the existing Windows 10 experience. You can see a good summary of the new features at https...

What is AppAnalytics? A few years ago, Embarcadero introduced the AppAnalytics technology, a simple and effective way to add in-app analytics to VCL and FMX applications using ready-to-use components and a paid SaaS offering for the AppAnalytics backend. Since introducing the service, the feedback from customers has been that they would prefer to host their own service, so we retired the paid SaaS offering earlier this year. With the 10.2.3 release, we started providing the component source co...

Last week a (large) customer sent me an email indicating he was experiencing issues when compiling the same project on different machines. Turned out the difference was in the source code files format and the root cause was a unit saved as UTF-8 but without a BOM. The reason? One of the developers is using Visual Studio Code... and the solution is a chancing that or using compiler flag. But before I get to the solution, let me show you the problem with a very simple test case. Delphi and S...

Delphi User Group Meeting, London A couple of weeks ago I was in London for personal reasons and teamed up with the UK Developers Group to attend their monthly meeting and talk about Delphi. I offered an introductory talk, some in depth on RAD Server compared to other web service technologies, plus some FireMonkey and VCL insights, and a deep dive on some advanced features of the Delphi language. This was a very nice event set up in a pub (and including the pub's food) in Camden. Here ar...

I haven't blogged much here in September, because I wrote two blog posts on the Embarcadero community site (given they were more official blog posts -- I generally blog on my personal blogs and the content is surfaced on the Embarcadero community): Build Flexible and Robust Apps with a Multi-Tier Architecture at https://community.embarcadero.com/blogs/entry/build-flexible-and-robust-apps-with-a-multi-tier-architecture: this blog post covers the evolution from client/server architectur...

RAD Studio, Delphi, and C++Builder come in 3 different editions: Professional, Enterprise and Architect. Until recently we also sold some of the Enterprise features as addons for the Professional version, but that has recently been discontinued. At the same time, we’ve also added additional capabilities to these editions. This is why I felt it is worth taking a moment to recap what’s the focus of each edition, who they are aimed to, and what they offer in terms of features. Professional Editio...

A Multi-Tier architecture separates the UI/Presentation, the application and business logic layer, the data access layers, and the database itself in separate applications, potentially running on different computers. In this blog post we’ll examine some of the key traits of this architecture and discuss key reasons for adopting this model. Multi-tier architectures are fairly common these days and they are becoming even more relevant in today’s mobile world, given the traditional client/server m...

Delphi CE Bootcamp is an 8 week FREE instructional lecture covering many different areas of Delphi development and focused on new developers as well as existing ones. The series begins next week, and I'm the first instructor. Lectures will be posted each week on each weeks topic and lecture replays will be available if you're not able to attend during a week. We expect to have also some Q&A sessions. The bootcamp is free but be sure to reserve your space early to make you get in, at: ...