Price Rise for Delphi Pro in 2013

[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] This morning I received yet another email from Embarcadero enjoining me to purchase Delphi XE3, using the same email address that is already associated with the EDN account I used to activate the Delphi XE3 I already own. Some people apparently find this to be perfectly normal and (presumably) effective marketing. I disagree. Even more annoying, is that this email dangled the carrot of a FREE HTMLBuilder if I purchased before 31st December. Not that I think I will have much use for it, but it might be nice if those people who already purchased would be offered the same free deal, instead of being harassed by spam offering this deal to them inappropriately. But more important than that was an interesting note buried at the bottom of that email: STOP PRESS! You will be saving another 10% if you buy before 31 December 2012 and beat the upcoming price increase on Professional Edition products from 01 January 2013! Has anybody heard details about this price rise ? Is it coincident with the inclusion of RAD Mobile Studio in the Pro range ?

Suggestions for Marco … ?

[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] I have elevated this comment from David I in a previous post, to the status of a post in it’s own right, in order that it might elicit the suggestions from readers/commenters that David seeks. I have adjusted the opening wording to make more sense in the context of a post, but give full credit to David I for kicking this off. I shall be responding myself shortly, but in the meantime, here’s the chance for others to contribute to an interim, ad-hoc “Delphi Survey” of sorts. 🙂

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (and the Margin on Spirits)

[Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes] I have decided I need to explain more clearly why I am so skeptical of the confident claims made for the “health” of Delphi based on the sales performance announced in the press release by Embarcadero earlier this year. Not that I don’t wish it were true, only that I fear that misplaced satisfaction can lead to complacency that I think could be costly. Rest assured, I shall respond to David I’s invitation to contribute to the list of things that the new Product Manager for Delphi might focus on soon. In the meantime I shall elevate his invitation to the status of a “New Post”, so as to elicit responses from others. But first, that press release.

New Delphi Product Manager and Top Engineers Depart ?

[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] Apparently the appointment of Macro Cantù as Delphi Product Manager has now been officially announced or at least confirmed. I cannot find any official announcement, not even on the Embarcadero web site. Anywhere. But the wires are full of people congratulating Marco on the official confirmation of his appointment and he has tweeted about it, so I have to assume it is now indeed confirmed.

Lazy or Efficient ?

[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] In his most recent post, Chris Rolliston points out a gotcha resulting from a change in the VCL with XE3. The post itself is quite interesting and makes some valid and significant observations. However, in the follow up comments Chris makes the observation that the old code was lazy, relied on a compiler detail and should have been “properly” re-written, rather than replacing reliance on one compiler detail with another. I think it is worth highlighting that Chris’ observations here are – I believe – directed at the use of untyped pointers and dynamic arrays, not the use of the pointer exposed by the TList class itself, as the two things could easily be conflated when reading Chris’ post and the QC issue it refers to.

What’s in a Word … ?

[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] In an exchange with David Heffernan both on SO and in the comments here on Te Waka, I had cause to climb in my own personal “Wayback Machine” and further investigate an apparent change in compiler behaviour between Delphi 2007 and 2009. This change was first identified as the result of some code of mine that stopped working in Delphi 2009. The instinctive reaction is “It must be some Unicode issue”, but it turned out that the “problem” was actually a fix to a compiler bug!