ECO Newsgroup...yes, there is one!

.....it just has a long name!

I was quite surprised that a lot of people do not know that there is an ECO-specific newsgroup on the Borland servers. It is called borland.public.delphi.modeldrivenarchitecture.eco. The best thing about this group is that the ECO developers give advise whenever they can! So, subscribe this group in your newsreader when starting to develop ECO applications as it'll make your life much easier when running into difficulties!

TDBGrid gets a face-lift

I always wondered why Borland never changed the look and feel of TDBGrid. A lot of people use it and it looks just "old fashioned" compared to all the other components. However, the community has Jeremy North who did an amazing job to theme the TDBGird control and named it TThemeDBGrid.

And the best thing: He made it available for free in CodeContral, Borland's community data repository. So, be sure to search for 'Jeremy North' in your next CC search in the author-field. It's well worth looking at!

You can see screenshots of the component on Jeremy's blog at http://jedqc.blogspot.com. Also be sure to look at his other great components at http://www.jed-software.com.

Common ASP.NET Hurdles

Okay, some of you might say: "Yeah, I know, why does he blog about it." However, I decided to post a link to this article of the MSDN Magazine that points out 10 common mistakes that are being made when developing ASP.NET powered sites. May be it'll help somebody fix something that has been an annoyance...

Look for it here.

CodeCentral as you will like it and always wanted it!

Borland's - or soon to be DevCo's - forum to exchange sources, complete sample projects, third party components and other stuff that is related to their products is called CodeCentral. You can access it by using http://cc.borland.com. However, now it even gets much more comfortable. David Clegg - he might actually change his name to David CCleg pretty soon if he spends more time on adding features (grin) - implemented a web service for CodeCentral ("CC"). Furthermore, he supplies a client that completely integrates into the IDE. On his blog he states that it should only serve for demo purposes, but I think it is really usable if you need to search for something on CC. I find it much easier and more comfortable to use than browsing for it online. Dave also published an article on BDN that sums everything up. You can access it here.

Finally! Another Delphi book!

The title ".NET 2.0 for Delphi Programmers" might sound misleading at first, but as I have seen the table of contents, which can be looked at here, I immediatelly pre-ordered it. It is already available in the United States at Amazon.com, but not yet in Germany.

The book is written for Delphi developers who want to get to know .NET. I was pretty overwhelmed when I looked at Delphi for .NET without actually knowing anything about .NET. At that time, there was only a book that dealt with C# to show what .NET was all about. However, right now I would have the choice to order a book that used Delphi instead of another language.

So, count yourselves lucky and be happy that you can order a Delphi book that can get you started with .NET and gives you a whole lot of the details you need. I prepared two links: United States and Germany.

Thanks Jon!

Note: venkatesh pointed out that he found an eBook-version that is available for 30$. I just wanted to point it out, but have not googled for it yet.

IDE Hints revisited...

Jeremy North pinged me and wanted to wish me a nice weekend. He also said: "I want you to look at something. Simply install those packages I sent you into the IDE and tell me what you think."
I did not know what it was, but I gladly complied and installed the packages, restarted Delphi and was purely amazed.

See for yourself. Jeremy said this was basically just something has been fiddling around with, but all this stuff will be included in an upcoming product he is giving the finishing touches right night now. I will keep those packages installed as the IDE looks really nice this way!

I am very eager to see what it is, to be honest, but I am quite sure, Jeremy will have more details soon. You can find Jeremy North's components at http://www.jed-software.com .