Round Table Proposed Topics

Priority Topics..

If there's time topics..

1.ECO for Win32

Borland is pursuing MDA at the enterprise level with ECO. Currently however this is for .net only. Apparently CORE SDP is going to be available for Win 32 - when will ECO be available for Win 32 (for those of us in no rush to go to .net who would love to use these tools in Delphi for Win32)?
Lauchlan McKinnon Melb
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2.Core SDP for Delphi - Release Date?

Also, related to that, what is the current expected release date for Core SDP for Delphi for Win32, and what will its Australian pricing be (Borland did not know this latter info at the time of their recent seminar on CoreSDP)
Lauchlan McKinnon Melb
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3.Win64?

someone's bound to ask: what are Borland's current plans for Win 64. My take is, it happens when it happens, but someone's bound to ask the questionanyway, so here it is . . .
Lauchlan McKinnon Melb
Is a 64 Bit Compiler planned. If so when ?
Arpad Farkas Melb
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4.Delphi for Linux

what are the plans / direction for Delphi for Linux? ie any new developments, is there ever going to be a version that uses the VCL ratherthan CLX?
Lauchlan McKinnon Melb
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5.SDLC

What extensions to the software life cycle can we expect? More profiling? Metrics? Automated testing? Perhaps exception management along
the lines of EurekaLog or MadExcept (both products are excellent, I'm
surprised Borland hasn't followed suit)
Lauchlan McKinnon Melb
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6.Compact Framework

I would be very interested in hearing about progress with Delphi for Compact Framework at the round table.
I understand that Danny is currently working on this, but there still seems to be debate about whether it will support WinForms or VCL.
From my perspective, I don't need a sophisticated gui, but I do need database connectivity, preferably using DbExpress. I would be happy to build the forms at run time if necessary.
There will be pressure to migrate this project to C# and Visual Studio if this isn't available in Delphi soon.
So I would like to hear about Borland's strategy, progress and timeframes, what non-visual parts of the VCL will be included, etc.
John McDonald Melb
- Any plans Borland may have for the .NET Compact Framework
Dick Walker Sydney
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7.Debugging with D2005

Anyone remember Danny Thorpe's Borcon presentation on using the Delphi Debugger a few years back?
I don't and that's my problem. I remember being impressed by it at the time but later finding my notes on it incomprehensible and my recollection faulty.
It would be great to see a BDN TV episode with Danny repeating that presentation updated for Delphi 2005.
Lachlan Gemmell Sydney
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8.D2005 Update?

Will there be an update 3 to D2005? Has it addresses the memory issues and the IDE stability (particularly error-insight and debugging).
Dick Walker Sydney
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9.Z-Order

For years I have accused Microsoft of not getting it right, and also accused large and small software developers of misusing even what Microsoft have supplied. MSDN documents a bunch of functions etc. but has never published a white paper on how it should all work. Or if they have, nobody, including MS developers know about it, or they all choose to ignore it. This is just one basic aspect of writing sociable programs to be run simultaneously.
Glenn Thompson
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10.Data Aware Controls in .NET

At the risk of a bun-fight between hard liners. ;-)
Now that .NET controls can be data aware, should we voluntarily not use this feature on principle? How good are the estimates that use of data-aware controls is more costly in long-term maintenance? Or is it just a gut feel?
Glenn Thompson
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11.Content Management - Borland is Hiring

Borland, the global leader in platform independent solutions for Software Delivery Optimization, has *several* opportunities in Cupertino/Scotts Valley for VERY SENIOR software engineers with experience in Content Management. From *Chief Scientist *to *Principle Engineers* to *Product Managers*… *Software Engineers* (OOD, C++) are needed in Atlanta and Santa Ana. We would like to talk with you! Discreetly of course
Peter McNab Melb
Any guesses on what the Borland content management product is going to be?
My guess is an Intranet content management system to coordinate activities of people on Core SDP (Calibre RM, Starteam etc) across the software development life cycle.
Lauchlan McKinnon Melb
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12.Static Analysis By Compiler

I don't know if others would be interested in this topic, but I would like to know if Borland would consider putting more work into static analysis in their compilers.

There is already some analysis done - producing warnings like:
"return value of function xxxx might be undefined"
"variable xxxx might not have been initialized"
but much more would be possible.
Some possibilities are:
A statement that told the compiler that the value of a variable was no longer valid, so a warning would be produced if the variable was used after this and before a new value was assigned.
A way of telling the compiler that all overrides of a method must call inherited - a warning would be produced if an override method did not.
The compiler should warn if nothing in a loop did anything that would terminate the loop - so the following examples would cause a warning.
while not SomeTable.EOF do .... without a SomeTable.Next;
or
while LocalVariable < 6 do .... without anything that modified LocalVariable
It would also warn if an iteration of a loop could avoid doing anything that would terminate the loop. So if you have a loop:
while not Table1.EOF and not Table2.EOF do .... every path through the loop should either call Next on Table1, or call Next on Table2, or call break or exit.
Obviously, the compiler can't always determine whether a loop will finish, but it should be able to detect common cases where it isn't going to.
I would like to be able to include AssertProvable(<boolean expression>) statements into my programs, where you are claiming that the expression is always true and is provable and you are asking the compiler to check this claim. This is much more powerful than an assert statement and could be used to confirm that results of a function are within a particular range, or that particular relationships between properties are maintained.
Maybe you could use Assert statements to define any preconditions for a method, and AssertProvable statements to check the post conditions.
I don't know enough about what is possible in this area, but I believe that the more checking you can get your compiler to do, the easier it is to write reliable code.

John McDonald Melb
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13.Eclipse and VS

According to Shinde, "the Borland SDO [Software Delivery Optimization] solution is going to be built on two primary platforms. One is Eclipse, the other is Visual Studio."
Grahame Grieve Melbourne

Intriguing. The whole article is about JBuilder and Eclipse, so I can only assume it's a misquote to abruptly mention "Visual Studio" like that
Peter Gummer Sydney

If you read all the gumph on bdn.borland.com and the borland blogs about Eclipse, Borland have committed a dev team to integrating their products into Eclipse, and David I and Pat Kerpan did a song and dance routine at EclipseCon 2005. Pat Kerpan has been quoted in two sources as saying that Eclipse has been a significant consideration at Borland since August 2003.
As a frustrated plug-in developer, I think its a great move. Its a good strategic move for Borland's ALM products. How well do commercial products fare inside the Eclipse community? I have no idea, but given the me-too flood mentioned in the itwriting article, there won't be any shortage of them.
One of the concerns I have about Borland or any company's complete ALM vertical solution is the effective lock-in. Can one company provide best-of-breed solutions in each slice of the ALM pie? I seriously doubt it, but if you buy into a closed framework, you're screwed.
If Eclipse is the framework, you may still end up wandering around hotel lobbys without your pants ...or you may not.
I wonder if there is a future for Delphi inside Eclipse? If Pat Kerpan is to be believed, it must have been considered. The Eclipse framework is written in Java to be sure. But the CBuilderX IDE was/is the JBuilder IDE and a pure Java solution. And SWT, the widget set underlying Eclipse, has ActiveX interoperability in the Windows flavour of Eclipse. And there are already C++ and C# environments in Eclipse.
The Delphi visual designer would have to be rewritten, but hey, they're doing it for .NET CF, and they've written one for ASP.NET.
Allen Bauer has pooh-poohed similar suggestions for Delphi inside VS, but I for one would be extremely interested to hear Danny and Tim's thoughts on this topic next Friday
Paul Spain Melb

The Eclipse IDE is extensible in the context of languages. But....it's be a pyrrhic victory to port the delphi suite - langauge, libraries, plug-ins, etc - to eclipse, but still to be world of it's own. And it'd be quite another project to break the barriers the way .Net does (in regard to languages). So I think we might see the delphi suite migrate towards VS far quicker than towards eclipse.
Grahame Grieve
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14.Optimization, Linking…

At Danny's last ADUG presentation he mentioned compiler optimizations like inline coding for (short) getters and setters and Delphi has always been great at selective linking so that we can have large functional libraries for code reuse without bloating the executables with unused code.
Question 1
Is compile time code optimization and selective linking still a priority within Delphi or does the Dot Net paradigm make this of lessor importance or more difficult to achieve. Can Danny give examples of recent optimization features and comment on where optimization is considered important
(Eg. Disk Size, Memory Utilization, Execution Speed)

Question 2
In Danny's view to what extent should the application developer worry about the compiler implementation. What things should the developer avoid and what sort of things can be in included for the sake of readability and maintenance with confidence that they will be optimized out by the compiler.

Roger Connell Melb
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15.Project Management at Borland

If there's time, I'd like some insight into the kind of project management framework that's applied at Scotts Valley. What metrics do they use, how agile are their methods, how is the commercial/technical interface (conflict!) managed, are things changing in any particular direction?
Just a thumbnail-Danny view, since this could be a presentation on it's own
Don Macrae Melb
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