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.
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.
Sorry I missed the announcement, but OpenOffice 2.0 is no longer beta. Read the press release, or go to the download page immediately (via bittorrent).
Thanks Pete, for pointing to this brilliant article by Marcus Ranum.
Oracle buys Siebel (CRM software) for big bucks. I remember Larry Ellison saying: “when a company starts buying other companies instead of innovating by itselves, it marks the end of that company”. Anyone like to comment on the recent developments?
David Intersimone, by most known as “David I”, is a respectable employer of Borland (already 20 years, he claims). In the latest post on his weblog, he shows us a graphical presentation of the development of software-development itself. Of course one can not help but noticing the similarities in the way Borland/Inprise/Borland developped itselves over the years. Switching from lots of small fish (individual developers) to a couple of really big fish (the enterprises). To stay with the fishing-analogy: if you want to catch more fish to bring in more money, why not expand your fleet with some large ships to bring in the really large fish, and keep the smaller boats to supply the market with small fish too. No, Borland sees it differently: sell the smaller ships to buy a new big boat. As we all know, big fish are more difficult to find, harder to catch, and you can only handle a couple of them with one boat. I’m not sure if this is the winning strategy. I complained about it before (do a search): Borland is getting too expensive for the one-man-band companies out there.
Oh, and while looking at the graph, which side did you feel most comfortable with? Left or right? Another thing: what’s the difference between “2000 – Process Centric” and “2005+ – Role based”? Let me tell you: none. Processes are done by certain roles, if you have your organisation straight. There is more history-repeats-itselves in the graph, but that is up to the reader.
Note: The x-axis is used for the timescale, the y-axis is the price of the Borland products, with an exponentional-scale to allow (misleading) linear progression.
Lino has a very interesting article about the future of Delphi. If you love, hate, use or in any other way know Delphi, please read his story. Mind you: it will hurt.