Monthly Archives: May 2006

General

M16 are hiring…

You would be forgiven if you missed it last week, what with Prescott, Clarke and Hewitt taking the limelight, but for the first time in its history, M16 are publicly recruiting staff.

On Thursday 27th April, The Times ran this advert:

M16 Advert1.gif

A day later they ran Pass notes No 160: MI6 RECRUITMENT DRIVE

Interestingly, M16 is now also known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), as this post confirms.

Amongst other positions, they’re looking for software folks with these skills: OO languages such as J2EE, Java/HTML, Oracle SQL, C# and .net. and must be able to operate in Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server and/or Linux/Unix. If you fancy a change of scenery, sign up here. If that doesn’t work, try this.

Opinion

Do you send personal e-mails using your employer’s computer?

2 Comments

According to a piece in today’s Times newspaper, employers may find themselves having to record their employee’s personal Internet usage (including e-mail) or both parties may face a “new” stealth tax. Stealth, because it was sneaked in to the recent budget without any hullabaloo, blink and you might have missed it.

Unless the personal usage is “not significant”, in which case the tax is ignored, both employee and employer will be taxed. Obviously there is clear debate about the use of the term “not significant”, however it is unlikely to be within the bounds of reasonableness, a word clearly not in the Labour Party’s dictionary, as events surrounding Prescott’s Promiscuity, Clarke’s Convicts and Hewitt’s Heckles, all of which are now in the public domain, can confirm.

Personally, I use my employer’s e-mail facility to manage what I need to do “as a whole”. I send e-mails from my office to my personal desktop such that I can manage my time better. I don’t want to find myself reading newsletter after newsletter whilst I’m at work. I receive notification of the newsletters at work, sift through them at a content-level (i.e. scan them), then I forward the relevant ones to my home PC where I can spend a little more time reading them and surfing. Now, if Gordon Brown wants me to read the newsletters whilst I’m at work, that’s fine, but he should find some way of compensating my employer for around 6-8 hours per week. IT is a fast moving game, how else can we keep on top of it without constant learning?

And who’s going to pick up the cost of implementing a system that can accurately monitor personal vs corporate e-mail/Internet usage? Sure, there are products on the market that claim to do this, however in my experience unless they are set up correctly, they tend to get in the way of real work. Less able firms, with absent or inadequate IT direction, will struggle with this ruling, perhaps opting for a “personal blacklist” whereby overtime known “personal” addresses and domain names are blocked. I would take umbrage to this kind of mentality for a number of reasons:

  1. I use my blog to record information that I think might be useful to others…it’s also my way of ensuring I have some information “to hand”. I refer to some of the code samples and links on my blog a couple of time per day, it helps me with my day job.
  2. I communicate with a number of people (using e-mail) to organise social events (personal) and to conduct job-related business, the “personal blacklist” wouldn’t work in this situation.
  3. I send myself e-mails between my home computer and my office e-mail address that act as reminders, things to do etc. I also use shared tasks, shared calendars, etc. between my home computer and my office computer.
  4. The previously noted “newsletter” scenario.

I think it’s fair to say that those of us who find it useful to mix personal/business like this, do so because we find ourselves more productive as a result. A taxation of this kind would see my productivity take a hit, I would have to change the way I work because of a tax introduced by Government I didn’t vote for. Taxation doesn’t win votes. Taxation encourages emigration. When it’s votes that count, you can’t help but want to reduce emigration because emigration not only affects the number of potential votes, but it affects the economy too.

The recent scrapping of the Home Computing Initiative, whereby employees could purchase a PC via their employer with some for of tax relief, this is yet another blow to the promotion of IT uptake in the UK. I know of a handful of employees who would rather “ask a friend” for a little help with their office PC than go to some corporate helpdesks – more so for the “lesser done, easily forgotten” tasks in popular word processors or spreadsheets.

This is another fine example of the Government hitting on the masses, whereby we’ve seen taxation on travel (airport taxes, etc.) and massively increased fuel prices. I am surprised that there is no obvious taxation on the sending/receiving of SMS/MMS text messages as the sheer profusion of them sent every day seems to be an easy and obvious target.

What’s next Gordon, a tax on the office Biro that I use for personal business inside and outside of office hours?

With the current Government’s inability to differentiate between public and private, I refer to of course the aforementioned threesome, how can they possibly be trusted to enforce a IT tax like this?

.net, Delphi, Development, Opinion

Alas poor Delphi, do I see a sharp future ahead?

[Warning: thought gathering rambling follows, coherence might be sacrificed.]

Following Tod Nielsen’s letter announcing that Borland would be divesting their IDE product lines, driving an even tighter focus on the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) market, what future lies ahead for those of us who have been using Delphi for most of the last eleven years?

I know that I am not alone in having an opinion about this divestment, and it’s one that may result in a further blog posting. Even some Microsoft employees have a very heavy interest in Borland’s divestment plans, some who were/are very close to the Delphi scene.

However, the purpose of this posting to two-fold:

  1. to plug Gnostice’s PDFOne – their .net 1.1/2.0 PDF creation components. It’s a great product, I reviewed their earlier Win32 VCL offering, eDocEngine and found it to be totally awesome (as this review confirms!). However, and this is not a criticism by any means, but the PDFOne demonstrations are written using C#. I believe that this is decision to use C#, and Gnostice are not alone, is a key driver that will dictate the direction of the “Delphi Language”.
  2. to try and understand, whether in this posting or a follow up, what might happen to Delphi as a “language”, if all vendors in the .net space move their demonstrations and support over to C#

Gnostice have produced a product for use in the .net environment. Without splitting hairs, that means products like: Borland Developer Studio 2005/6 (Delphi 2005/6), Visual Studio 2003/5, Visual C#/VB Express Editions. Given that Delphi 200x targets .net 1.1, Gnostice were wise to produce assemblies for both .net 1.1 and .net 2.0. The demonstration application that is supplied with PDFOne is written using C#…which means that it will work with Delphi 200x (via its “C#Builder” or C# personality) and it will work in the Microsoft IDEs too.

Of the other vendors who are moving their components (demonstrations and documentation too) from the VCL to .net, what if a number of them started ignoring true Delphi and provided C# examples? I guess most of us would just muck in and convert the code on an as-needed basis, after all, it’s not very difficult converting C# examples into true Delphi code (and vice versa). Certainly it would make me think about whether I should be writing any new applications using true Delphi code.

The importance of the “Delphi Language” is gradually being eaten away by the almost omnipresent C#. There are folks out there who believe C# is the best thing since sliced bread. However, us folks in the Delphi world have enjoyed virtually everything that C# has to offer today. Granted language progression slowed down somewhat when Anders Heilsberg joined Microsoft (see his TechTalk here). C#, and parts of the .NET framework (especially 1.1) are not as well abstracted as people might think, especially those of us with a Delphi background, a point that I made during my recent lament about Borland and .NET:

…is .NET 2.0 up-to-date with regard to the needs of today’s developer? I’m not so sure: Delphi was the first product to simplify Windows-based development with its glorious abstractions around WndProc and the Windows messaging sub-system. No longer did we have to write code to create treeviews, add nodes, or draw them in special ways, etc. Win32 development with Delphi was almost reduced mouse clicks. Visual Studio for .NET 1.1 brought a similar IDE metaphor to the .NET world, however it lacked a number of Win32-style events that we in the Delphi world take for granted, such as the simple ability to have owner draw controls (have you never wanted to make root nodes in a treeview bold?) In .NET 1.1, it’s back to basics, you have to implement everything yourself (as described in these hoops and by the example here.)

So Delphi 200x IDEs may be relegated to being competition for Microsoft’s IDEs. Is that such a bad thing? Can the market withstand such competition? Well, Borland obviously have a view on the competitive aspects of their IDE – they’re selling it off. By selling it off, they are telling me two things:

  1. They’ve got something else to focus on, in this case ALM. Presumably this is the next big cash-cow and we all should be buying shares in any company that promises big things in the ALM space.
  2. They’re hoping that the potential buyer will work with developers and the market space, and will progress the IDE within the competitive environment. I certainly hope this is the case.

Delphi itself, as a product, has always enjoyed a lot of kudos because of its legacy support, i.e. applications written using previous versions would re-compile with newer versions. The only problem in this legacy support scenario is third party components. [Borland, please note, this is not a criticism] For years Borland have charged circa £1000 for an upgrade to the next major version or nearly £2000 for a new purchase. Now, I am a Delphi fanatic and have been for 10 years. That’s a lot of upgrade cash. I’ve lost track of the number of Delphi developers who recite the same story to me, especially at user group meetings and developer events.

It’s one thing migrating a vanilla Delphi application from one version to the next major version, it’s another thing to migrate an application that is “third party component heavy”. It’s another thing because we have to shell out for the third party components that match the version of Delphi we’re upgrading to. If you’re doing well, the third party component vendor(s) have kept up and their products are available when you need them…not months after the release of Delphi itself.

On the other hand, and keeping things equal, I like the Microsoft IDEs too. Whilst both Borland and Microsoft IDEs require huge amounts of desktop real estate (screen resolution), each of the respective IDEs have a number of features that make them a delight to work with. Granted, in terms of developer productivity, they are behind the likes of IntelliJ, although it’s authors are making great efforts to correct that as Rob Lally confirms in his write up here (expect a Resharper review to appear here and over at Scottish Developers real soon now!)

I wonder if the recent emphasis on C# signifies the demise of what we know as the “Delphi Language”? Two things will provide the answer: time and the new DevCo who take over the Borland IDE market space. Will there be developer consultation? Will there be a customer satisfaction survey that lets us suggest what language features to important to us? I certainly hope so.

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Further Reading
Borland rides Segue on trip out of IDE biz
Borland gambles without developers
Marco Cantu’s Support Delphi blog posting.
DavidI’s posting is here.
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/03/07/borland_ditches_delphi/
Hopefully this posting is merely an April Fool’s joke?
Product Roadmap
Borland wants to be a Red Hat for developers