Archive for the 'General' Category

We’ve released two new EAP versions in the last few days. On Thursday, we released the 3.0.2 EAP which fixes a few problems in the Console/Configuration Builder (most of the Console bugs were related to the shutdown behavior and pipe server). And a few minutes ago, I uploaded the new 3.0.3 version which introduces a new SmartInspect service application called the SmartInspect Router. From the docs:

The SmartInspect Router is a Windows service application which can receive SmartInspect log packets via TCP/IP or named pipes and routes them to different log destinations. The supported log destinations are the same as those from the SmartInspect libraries, namely log files, TCP/IP or named pipes. Two typical uses of the SmartInspect Router are to combine multiple client logs into a single log file and to collect logs in a central location. The SmartInspect Router is intended to provide a common logging infrastructure for distributed systems, multi-process applications and web applications.

Since SmartInspect is used more and more for web applications and distributed systems it became clear that we needed a server application that can receive logs via TCP/IP or named pipes and stores them in a central location. Many customers have expressed their need for such a solution.

We began work on the SmartInspect Router a few months ago and are happy to finally release the first version in this EAP. After installing the new EAP version, you can find the setup of the SmartInspect Router in the deploy directory of your SmartInspect EAP installation. The SmartInspect Router can be configured with a simple XML configuration file (please see the included help for details).

Releasing a completely new application is always a challenge and there might be a few things that don’t work correctly. If you encounter a problem with the SmartInspect Router, we would appreciate a comment in our SmartInspect EAP forum.

Well, not really we, unless I can convince Tobias also to twitter. You can follow me on twitter and get the latest updates from Gurock Software and everything else that is happening around here.

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I would also love to hear from other MicroISVs or Delphi developers who are twittering. Just leave a comment, follow me on twitter or email me. Thanks!

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!

Joe White started an interesting and promising project: the DGrok Delphi Grammar project. This project aims to document the entire Delphi language grammar and provide a complete parser for Delphi. There are a few Delphi parsers out there that are far from complete so it would be very useful to see a complete Delphi parser.

We recently had the need for a Delphi parser for our SmartInspect Delphi plugin. Because we couldn’t find one that suited our needs, we had to write our own one (an incomplete one with just the things we needed). A complete Delphi parser could be used for things like refactoring, extracting documentation, code formatters or code navigation add-ons for the Delphi IDE. So keep up the good work Joe and I’m looking forward to see the final results!

I finally found the time to install a new forum software for the Gurock Software website. We used our own custom forum before (which, in retrospect, wasn’t a very smart idea) but wanted to get a more advanced forum with user accounts, email notifications, search and so on. We now use the very nice UseBB forum package which we already use for our Delphi Forum on DelphiFeeds.com. So why not create an account and say ‘hi’?

New Forum: http://www.gurock.com/support/forum/

After reviewing SmartInspect 1.4 for DevCity.NET last year, John Spano has taken a look at the new features of SmartInspect 2.x and reviewed the new version:

“SmartInspect has always been a very well written logging product. With the release of version 2, it’s much more powerful and easy to use now. I highly recommend it and suggest you download the trial version and see how it can simplify your application logging.”

Thanks John! Read the full review here: SmartInspect 2.x review on DevCity.NET

We just relaunched DelphiFeeds.com, our Delphi blog aggregator and Delphi community website. But because we had to change the DNS entry of the domain, you might not be able to see the new site for the next 20 hours.

Besides building a new design for the site, we added new sections like the new Delphi Forum and the Delphi Blog of the Year Award. To celebrate the relaunch of the site, we added the award where you can vote for your favorite Delphi blog and have the chance to win cool prizes from participating sponsors. We organized some very nice prizes with a total value of more than US $4,000!

Besides adding more newsgroups to the front page, we also changed the newsgroup links from Google Groups to dev.newswhat.com, Marco Cantù’s Delphi newsgroup site. This site offers a much nicer interface to the newsgroups than Google does and it is more popular in the Delphi community anyway.

We hope that you like the new site and that you participate in the forums! Also don’t forget to vote for your favorite Delphi blog and don’t miss the chance to win the nice prizes.

It looks like Fog Creek is adding a Wiki to their bug tracking product Fogbugz. How I know this? Look at Joel’s latest posting. Notice the link to the Wiki? It’s a link to a Fogbugz installation.

If the Wiki is done right, with good integration with the rest of Fogbugz, this could become a very useful feature. We used the Wiki in Trac before we switched to Fogbugz, and it certainly was nice to have.

We are currently experiencing difficulties with our email setup as some providers are classifying our emails as spam. We are investigating the issue at the moment and suspect that the IP address block of our hosting provider got blacklisted. If you sent us emails in the last time and didn’t get a response, please resend the email and we will answer with another email account. We generally answer all emails within one business day and often much faster.

SmartInspect 2.1 is the first SmartInspect version that comes with support for the new Delphi 2007 including project files, pre-compiled binaries, live templates and IDE integration. We also included a new regular expression library for improved searching and filtering.

The new regular expression library we use is based on the de facto regular expression standard PCRE which allows for much greater flexibility in the filter and search expressions. We also fixed a bunch of bugs of the 2.0 release. More details here:

http://www.gurock.com/products/smartinspect/whatsnew/2.1/