We wish all our customers, partners, vendors and friends happy holidays and a happy and successful new year (or, as we say here in Germany, a good slide into the new year). 2007 was a crazy year for us and we had many important milestones of which the release of SmartInspect 2.0 was the most important one. We are looking forward to 2008 and are excited to see what the new year brings.
There is a very informative thread on BoS going on right now about getting a proper office. Most people advise the original poster against getting an office and suggest saving the money instead. However, one important reason for getting a proper office isn’t mentioned in the thread: separation of work and life. Separating work and life isn’t as easy if you work from an office at home. There are so many distractions that can lead to unproductivity in a home office that getting a proper office could pay off very quickly.
After working from a home office for some years now, we found it has many advantages on one hand and some serious drawbacks on the other hand. On the negative side, we found it quite stressful because we were basically working at all times. Although a proper office has other nice advantages like the possibility to grow, to invite partners, vendors and customers, we decided to get a proper office mainly for life and work separation. That’s why we have been looking for an office in the past few weeks and finally found one we like in the TechnologiePark Paderborn, where we will sign the lease in the coming week.
You have to decide for yourself if getting a proper office makes sense for you. We are sure that it’s the right thing for us and we are really looking forward to our new office in the coming year!
We just released a new SmartInspect version with official support for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. Grab the new version from our customer portal at My Gurock.com while it’s hot!
This is a quick posting to let you know that we decided not to renew our partnership with ComponentSource. If you purchased SmartInspect via ComponentSource in the past, just get in touch with us (if you haven’t already) and we will provide you with an account on our customer portal. This ensures that you can download future SmartInspect versions immediately.
Daniel Wischnewski will be holding a SmartInspect session at the next EKON Spring in February next year. EKON Spring is a CodeGear centric conference in Frankfurt, Germany and is supported by CodeGear / Borland. Here is a short overview over Daniel’s session:
“In this session I will show you how to use SmartInspect in your applications, how to pass objects, how to inspect and watchs values over time, and most importantly give you a strategy on how to implement it into an already existing application - like an afterthought. But be warned, planing to use such a tool upfront is more sensible ;-)”
So if you are at the next EKON and would like to see how to get the most out of SmartInspect, be sure to visit Daniel’s session.
Some fellow Delphi developers need your help over on the DelphiFeeds.com forums. I suspect that most people posting questions on the DelphiFeeds.com forums are new to Delphi and aren’t into the newsgroups (yet). So, why not show those new Delphi developers that the Delphi community is one of the most helpful communities out there and give them some tips on their questions. I’m sure they appreciate any help you can give!
» DelphiFeeds.com Forums
Daniel Wischnewski just posted the first part of what looks like a blog series of a comparison of our logging tool SmartInspect and CodeSite, a competing product for the Delphi market. Daniel seems to like SmartInspect so far:
“With 4500 messages coming in about two seconds, CodeSite will take it’s time to update the list, while SmartInspect does not really loose performance whether auto-scroll is turned on or not. Okay, so on the view side, SmartInspect wins outright.”
I really welcome this comparison, as a few prospective customers asked about the pros and cons of SmartInspect and CodeSite before. And instead of giving my subjective list of pros and cons, I will now be able to point them to a fair comparison of the two products.
Holger Flick just announced a beta version of a logging class for SmartInspect to log ECO objects. For those of you who have never heard about ECO, it’s “an application framework that allows you to take applications from design to implementation in a much shorter time.” It’s a .NET framework that originally shipped with Delphi C#Builder and is currently being prepared for a broader release by CapableObjects, a newly founded company that took over the development of ECO. Holger does a very good job explaining what ECO is and how it can be used to speed up the development of database applications. His new logging class definitely looks very interesting for ECO logging as such highly abstract frameworks tend to be harder to debug than normal projects.
As you have probably already heard, CodeGear recently released RAD Studio 2007, the latest version of its IDE for Delphi and C++Builder users. The latest SmartInspect version (2.3.1) already supports this new IDE out-of-the-box with pre-compiled units and packages and comes with an updated setup to easily integrate SmartInspect into this new IDE. So if you plan on getting CodeGear’s new IDE, just download the latest SmartInspect version from My Gurock.com and you are all set.
Marco Cantù just released his Delphi 2007 Handbook which can now be ordered directly from Lulu.com. To quote Marco on his new book:
“After writing 8 Mastering Delphi books, I’ve come to the decision that the Delphi community needs something different. Rather than writing an all-encompassing book, covering both introductory and advanced material, I think it makes more sense to write a book focused on existing experienced Delphi developers.”
“As many of these developers have missed the last couple of versions of Delphi, the aim of the book is to bring them up to speed covering the most important features added since Delphi 7. In most cases the material goes into some depth as it is not meant for beginners. Some of the new technologies, though, are only briefly covered as a way of introduction.”
I think this is a very smart move as the number of new Delphi developers has declined over the recent years and if you want to sell a new Delphi book, you better had some interesting content for existing users. By the way, Marco also posted some interesting blog postings about his experience with self-publishing a book on Lulu.com. Interesting read!
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