Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

A lot has changed in the 10 years between Delphi 4 and Delphi 2009.

When I first purchased Delphi 2, I spent maybe a year learning it, and on upgrade to Delphi 3 and then to 4, I had to learn what was new. I have a whole shelf of Delphi books, 14 of them now that I look, but none is newer than Mastering Delphi 5 by Marco Cantu.

So it’s time for an update. Marco is the “master”, so off to his site. (His is among the blogs I follow).

Marco stopped his Mastering series with Delphi 2005. That’s the last complete reference he’s put together. It’s available from Amazon. In my case, I have now just purchased it from Amazon.ca. He also has source code from the book at his Google group.

He made an Update for Delphi 2006 available free at his site.

Next is to purchase his Delphi 2007 Handbook from Lulu, which again only updates what’s new. The page also has an early version of his source code files. Hopefully the book will list a final version.

I’ll have to wait though, for his new Delphi 2009 Handbook. It will also be published by Lulu but he’s not quite finished and hopes it will be available in November.

So a few thousand pages to read and digest should get me up to speed and fill up all my time between programming.

I used two tools with Delphi 4 to help optimize Behold and check for memory leaks.

GpProfile by Primoz Gabrijelcic (hence the Gp) was a free profiler for Delphi 2, 3, 4 and 5. I used it quite a bit for optimizing Behold and especially the guts of TRichView. Many of the improvements I found for TRichView I gave to Sergey and were included in later versions of it.

By the end of 2000, GpProfile was no longer supported. It worked for me up to now, since I was still using Delphi 4. But I don’t trust it to work with Delphi 2009. So I need something else.

The tool I used to optimize memory and look for leaks was Memory Sleuth by TurboPower. When I got it 10 years ago, it was free. They later came out with Version 2 and Version 3 and by then were charging $349 US for it. I never upgraded, since what it did in the early free version worked well enough for me. But that whole company closed in 2003 and they made most of their programs OpenSource. I don’t think MemorySleuth was one of them and it is now a relic as well.

So I will need something new that works with Delphi 2009. For profilers, I can only seem to find two. One is ProDelphi. It doesn’t look bad and I’d need the professional version which costs 57.5 Euros (or about $80 US). The other is AQtime by AutomatedQA, and I’ll talk about that in a moment.

For memory debuggers, there’s one that stands out. It’s MemProof by Atanas Soyanov and it’s free. Just one problem. It was bought out by AutomatedQA. They made it available free for awhile, but last year they took MemProof off their website and integrated all its functionality into AQtime.

The good thing about AQtime is that it is apparently a fantastic product. It has won Delphi best software awards for several years and the integration with Delphi and capabilities seem amazing. The bad thing is that it will cost me $599 US and the Canadian dollar has just dipped 15% in the last month (ouch). That’s almost as much as the full version of Delphi 2009 costs.

But looking at AQtime, and looking at my plans and my optimization needs for Behold, I expect I will go for the 30 day download trial once I begin that task, and after 30 days then decide whether to purchase it. I expect that I will.

I am looking forward to seeing what amazing things it will do for Behold once I start optimizing the new core of TRichView, Virtual Treeview, and the implementation of the DISQLite3 database package.

I’ve had a book for awhile that I purchased and until now didn’t get a chance to read. I started reading it this week. It’s called “Dreaming in Code” by Scott Rosenberg. It’s the story of an innovative software project called Chandler and the trials and effort involved in its development. I like to read these things. It helps me formulate ideas and motivate me more towards Behold.

I’ve only read a few chapters so far, and I had gathered from all this that it was a project that never completed, and this was the story as to why.

Yesterday I received my weekly PCworld mailing that had an article on the 25 Best Business Software Tools and Web Services. It took me completely by surprise to see that Chandler was listed.

Chandler is alive and well and is available free for download and online. I’ve been looking for years for a good ToDo list / Organizer, and I must have checked out 2 dozen different programs for that, but nothing has suited my fancy that I stuck with. I bet my frustrations have been the same ones that the developers of Chandler have had.

I downloaded Chandler and I’ll try it out. It is to organizing software, what Behold is to genealogical software.

Now I’ll have to finish the book and finish Behold.