Yes, a Delphi Roadmap.

It's here, finally. From Danny's post on Borland's Delphi Roadmap, the whole "strategy" thing is a lot clearer. So we have a future, for both the Win32 and .NET side of things.

What we have is:
Dexter in 2005

• Language improvents: (e.g. operator overloading)
• Speed: IDE Startup and runtime speed improvements (with stuff from the Fastcode Project)
• C++ support (Win32) including support for the VCL
• Command line CF compiler

Highlander in 2006

• Another dumb project name ("Highlander"???)
• .NET 2.0 support (if .NET 2.0 is actually out by then)
• We're talking generics, partial classes, and nullable types.
• The CF "IDE" with VCL.NET support

Overall this shows that Borland has a vision for a product that's always been good, but has lost a lot of its former shine. Now, what we need is for Borland Management to not backtrack. Let there be more such informal fixes and more informal previews of upcoming products.

Oh yes, there's even talk of a Delphi Win64 compiler in 2007.

"Beginning to Offshore"?????

Why do people write like this? Choice phrases:

• "clichés, outlook and a realistic suggestions"
• But, flourishing outsourced development engages more than defining a product spec.
• "remember: the more an outsourcer comprehends the milieu, the better prepared it will be..."

Overall the entire article is as clear as mud. But there's more! It's a ripoff from Bharat Khatau's original article, which is a magnitude better in content and grammar. The rip off is terrible - it's just run through a thesaurus, methinks. Every single sentence has been rephrased...no, has been gramatically assaulted - to produce something that might pass a copyright test, but fails on the ground that it's utter nonsense.

The original article has this for instance:
"Success requires careful definition of how your company and the outsourcer will interact - and the right spirit governing those interactions.".

The rip-off says :
"Success necessitates fastidious description of the way your company and the outsourcer will interrelate".

Also, Good projects for successful pilots involve minimal risks to the business strategy or core product

becomes First-rate projects for triumphant pilots rivet least risks to the business strategy or core product.

("rivet least risks"???? What are they smoking?)

The rip-off has, very helpfully, placed a link to the original article. Which kinda sums it up, I think: it's not a malicious act, they're just stupid.

Let me not take away from the entertainment value, of course. You need such articles so you can tell people - "I may be bad at documentation, but I ain't *this* bad".

(If you like using one-and-a-half-foot words, you'll love sesqupedal pedantry)

A TeamB'er wrote Dr. Watson!

Just went through a Matt Pietrek post about Dr. Watson.The original author, Don Corbitt, was a member of TeamB before he joined Microsoft! (Very sadly, Don died in a private plane crash)

Also Matt was a Borlander, and he wrote a "Dr. Frank" to overcome the limitations - named after, I guess, Frank Borland. Speaking of debugging tools, I just found some free hex editors and disassemblers here. Amazing how much stuff is available out there, for free.

Microsoft Research

I just visited Dan Miser's Blog and found a link to Microsoft Research Downloads. I knew they did some research out there, but this stuff is just awesome! They have Allegiance- a multiplayer space-combat game, source code to attach to WiFi Networks using a single WiFi card, and even a safe versoin of C.

I haven't yet experiemented with ConferenceXP - another one of the research projects. Essentially it's software that allows video conferences to be "multi-cast" across a network - currently it needs a good/fast link, multi cast support and a really high end dedicated server for such stuff, but I think in the near future that will not be a big issue. This is a killer app, especially for multi location offices like ours. What I like about this is the ability to "archive" sessions - so that people who couldn't attend a session can view it at a later date. I've always wanted such things for conference calls - i.e. record a call to mp3 and then run it back for a transcript. (If anyone knows such a tool...)

Also, we've started to use Skype for office communication. It's amazing in terms of quality and also has an answering machine. Not that I hate regular phones - but I think they're too darn expensive when you're calling between India and the UK.

Yeah, no code in this post either. I have not compiled anything for weeks now...but I have found time to play squash. Maybe they're mutually exclusive.