Julie Andrews, as Mary Poppins, sang "Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down." The "Spoonful of Sugar" song starts "In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap the job's a game".  When I am programming, I am having fun.  Yes, it is also a job, but, creating software is a job, a game, and total fun.  In programming languages, some people might claim that certain language features are "syntactic sugar".  The claim is that syntax was added to m...

This is a post for my beloved Grzeniuś:-). I have change the describtion of my blog to "Delphi Programming" and added "Delphi Programming" category. Watch out TIOBE index! Delphi is strongly rising. The SDC conference this week was very good and Delphi track was very rich and interesting. In the evening, at the first conference day, during relaxed "Delphi Tips & Tricks" session with Bob Swart and Nick Hodges I have demonstrated automating ER/Studio application in Delphi code from a Del...

Last month I've been in Toronto on Embarcadero technical kick-off session where software consultants, product managers, and all technical stuff were sharing knowledge about CodeGear and DatabaseGear products, technologies, plans, roadmaps and - most importantly - building team spirit of our new, bigger family of techies. Right after the kick-off I went for summer vacation to sunny Croatia and that is the reason for the delay in writing this post. I would say that 95% of Delphi and C++Builder ...

Why do we write applications? One answer could be "for fun", but not always we are in such a comfortable situation of doing something without a real (business) reason. This is where "Creating Value from Programming" comes in. Recently we've done a joint session with Jeroen Pluimers on the Software Developer Event "Office Stuff!!" about different ways of automating Excel and Word from Delphi. Lots of people in banks, insurance companies, corporate headquarters and similar institutions spend mo...