How time flies...

It is amazing how time flies when you get engaged to the woman of your dreams, and move to another city! In the midst of moving all the furniture, refurbishing and selling the old apartment, getting to know my new bonus kids, and walking the dog - I also changed jobs :) I am no longer an Oslo citizen, but mainly work from home, about 180km further south on the sunny coastline from Oslo. So... what happened on the Delphi level of things?

Status: D5 -> D2009 port: It never completed. The dependencies between the old TopView grid and the database ORM were too large, and the TopView component turned to be for all practical purposes - non-portable. Not only because of the Unicode change, but also due to the fact that they changed the database TBookmark definition. At that point, it became clear that there was not enough resources/time to complete the work needed to complete port within reasonable cost.

I did plan on writing further posts on the migration process, but the main points about the Unicode change have already been covered elsewhere. All in all, it is quite remarkable how smooth that transition seem to have gone.

In January 2010, I began in a new position at Tine SA. No more porting projects, but writing and maintaining data warehouse, production and logistics related code for the dairy product manufacturing at Tine, using Delphi 2010, and integrating with Lawson's MOVEX M3 AS/400 ERP systems, as well as various robotic systems, using MSSQL Server 2008 as the backend.

The Tine team is a distributed team, working from many different geographical locations, that meet up at the same place physically just a few days every month. I am pleasantly surprised of how enjoyable and effective this way of working is! Naturally, it requires a bit more planning and coordination, but with good project management and regular meetings - it works better than I could have hoped for. The only drawback is that when I am mentally engaged in solving a new software challenge, my lady will complain that I spend too much time by the computer :)

Generics: We recently started refactoring the class hierarchies using Generics, and that has shaved about 7% off the number of lines of code in the projects so far. Hopefully, when we are done - the codebase will be 10-15% smaller than what we started with, and a lot simpler to maintain.

Generics is fun. Generics is also somewhat painful, as there are a lot of flaws in D2010. I can't wait to see which 87 generics issues that have been fixed in Delphi XE!

During the fall, I plan resuming the work on the FDCLib, and focus on getting the most out of Generics, Attributes, and Anonymous Methods. Stay tuned.