Oracle released beta 2 of their XE for Windows. It solves the following issues:
Get it here.
Microsoft is giving away the Express 2005 editions of Visual Webdeveloper, Basic, C#, C++, J# and SQL Server 2005. For a year. That means: if you download and register one (or more) of these products before November 6, 2006, you don’t have to pay for them, and you can use them forever without paying a dime. You can find all the information on this page. Go to the manual downloads if you want ISO-images of installation CD’s, all other downloads are socalled websetups.
Don’t take my word for it, but read Borland’s roadmap for Delphi yourself. The .NET 2.0 framework will be supported in Delphi 2006 (to be released somewhere in 2006, at earliest 2 months away). Avalon and Indigo are planned for 2007 (Delphi Longhorn).
Tom wrote about free courses for Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0. Be quick, the offers is supposed to end at November 17.
Late and recent Borland (the company) developments made me think about writing it again. Delphi2005 was very unstable and slow on my systems, and with some patches and third party solutions in speeding things up, you could (no, I did not use the word: should) have a decent development environment. Delphi2006 is here, and Borland is asking for another upgrade. They are not supporting .NET 2.0 in any way: that will be in their next release, probably Delphi2006.5, or D2007. That basically means how many upgrades until it finally works?
I am a Borland Delphi customer and was very happy with the product until they decided to support .NET. It’s out of their league. Of all .NET IDE’s I’ve tried, Delphi is the one I was least satisfied with. I produced E-Sync in VS.NET in less time with less trouble than I could have done with Delphi, even when being less familiar with C# than with Delphi (Object Pascal).
My advice to the Delphi community. Do a crashcourse C#. You’ll see it’s much like Pascal. Or Java, for that matter. Then buy VS.NET. Convert your Delphi-code to C#, and create new applications in C#. In the end you’ll save yourself a lot of time, you’ll be able to support .NET better and more stable, and you will have satisfied customers. How does that sound? Sounds good to me.
I just bought a datacable for my cellphone. It’s an USB-cable that converts the USB connection to a serial-connection (since the cellphone has a serial port). When you connect the cable, and the cellphone is “on”, you will have an extra com-port, that you can select in the software. Connecting the cord resulted in an extra com-port and removing the cord removed the extra com-port from the device-list. But the software did not detect the phone (please connect your phone first). USB is supposed to be plug&play, but as a last resort I restarted the PC, and to my surpise: the software recognised the cellphone. So the advice “I all fails, just reboot your machine” even works when connecting plug&play devices…