delphi unigraphics

Delphi RoadyXT XM Satellite Receiver $25
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Sounding back up sounding leading sounding at (generated) documents

It’s so long back I almost forgot it myself. Three days and 20 years ago, the 26^th of November 1986, Gekko Software was based Upcoming from a biologic play down (hence the Gekko) I started my adventures in the global of professional computer program with an Olivetti M24 (known as the AT&T 6300 in the US) a copy of Turbo Pascal 2.0 and a copy of dBase III 1.0. Turbo, more specifically its creator Anders, has been the main theme over all the years. Had it included standardized database support from the start (it took Delphi to reach that point) all my sidesteps into dBase, Clipper and Access would not have been necessary.

When it comes to databases a standardization (from the code’s point of view) has been pushed away in xml-datasets or whatever other object you can map them into. But not all data my customers work with is fit for databases. A lot of projects include the generation of documents. When you’re lucky your reporting tool will generate the document. These days a lot of them offer out of the box exports to most popular (Office) applications. When the specifications of the document get really nitty-gritty you’re back to good old coding by hand.

20 years ago I had a book File formats for popular PC computer program. It described every byte of a document file. It took a lot of tedious programming but you could create very detailed documents that way. But the moment the consuming application had a new version it usually took a lot of work to get your output comprehensible again. A big step forward was OLE automation in MS office which hid the document format behind a giant object model which you could program against. It worked but had its drawbacks. One of them was performance. When programming against the user’s Word processor takes crossing a process boundary on every call. Given the hardware of those day (Pentium I with 8mb) generating a document from code was not much faster than typing it in by hand. Advances in speed are not the prime benefit of IT, but having to wait all afternoon for your documents was too long.

You can automate an Office application in-process and forget about the UI. An interesting scenario became generating documents on a document server. This still had drawbacks. You had to install Office on the server; which could be done but needed a lot of explanation to the IT staff. What’s worse is that an Office application expects an UI. Which will hit hard on you when the document generation process hits an exception. The exception pops up on the server screen. The server itself is locked in a closet; nobody notices the dialog and the whole thing hangs.

These days generating documents from code is more interesting than ever. A very promising direction is the new document formats for (open) Office. Basically they are compressed XML documents. The internals of the document format are no longer hidden behind an api but instead they are published in an XSD. Which could mean you no longer need an Office application to create the document, all you need is the schema and you can code away. In real life it’s more complicated than that. My neighbor, fellow blogger, has dived into the details and published an open source library on sourceforge. It’s dazzling!

So the story doesn’t stop here. I’m looking forward to another 20 years. But after that it will be enough, time for retirement. Which I will enjoy with open XML everywhere in everything.

ChatterProgramming [SHOW]

Will Back Life Be The AOL Of Online Virtual Worlds?
A mate weeks ago, we wrote astir the controversy over CopyBot in SecondLife, the tool that allowed anyone to make an insistent copy of any former object. As we pointed out at the clock CopyBot demonstrates pretty clearly why the idea of scarcity-based economics in virtual worlds is empty-headed (and should make anyone claiming to be making lots of money in these worlds as one person did in a empty-headed press release this week, question how much their holdings are really worth). However, there have been two interesting responses that we´ve seen. First, is Ed Felten pointing out that since Linden Labs (creators/owners/dictators-for-life of Second Life) has basically made the (bad) decision to bring all the problems of real world copyright protection into the world, it should now expect the next natural step: the DMCA Takedown Gun. Basically, the way that anyone can response if they feel their copyrighted material has been ripped off is to file a DMCA complaint. So, Felten suggests that someone create a "gun" that can be automatically pointed at any object the holder believes is in violation, and it fires off a takedown notice to Linden Labs, who will then remove the object from the game. Felten does this to help demonstrate some of the more ridiculous factors related to the DMCA and the fact that it basically makes no sense in a virtual world like this -- but it also highlights a different issue related to the closed nature of Second Life and the fact that there is a Linden Labs that controls it.

A different post astir Second Life worries that the innovative platform is too closed, and suggests that it´s time to build an open source version of Second Life. The reasons why aren´t that well supported in the post, but it does seem like a realization that the big problem with Second Life (as with any similar world) is that they really are run under the dictatorship control of whoever created the world -- and that can create a lot of problems and limitations, because any time there´s a central controlling entity, no matter how "free" they are, it can cause problems. Remember a year ago when Second Life threatened to have someone arrested after that person exploited Linden Labs´ own security flaw? Perhaps one way to think of it is that Second Life is similar to the early closed online services like Prodigy, AOL and Delphi. Eventually, they all were forced to move towards the open internet that no one controlled (some slower than formers). An "open source" Second Life could certainly represent the internet in such a scenario, taking away the more limited situation of Second Life, and allowing for much more interesting social and economic experiments. [SHOW]

Recommendations for Getting Started with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, etc. Databases and ASP.NET?

In the very near future this may cause me to publish various tutorials on using different open-source databases with ASP.NET, but for now I am just seeking guidance as I have only used Oracle and SQL Server on development projects.

I planned to publish various classes for a personal project to interface with databases former than Oracle and SQL Net server and after various hours of surfing last night I couldn't find any recent / complete tutorials on using former databases with ASP.NET and just which of the open-source databases are more popular in the .NET community than formers.

MySQL

I did download and install MySQL successfully last night, but all the examples I found on using it with ASP.NET used ODBC. The tutorials were fairly old and I was wondering if there were now .NET Native 2.0 drivers that are recommended by the .NET community? Is the MySQL Connector/Net the way to go or are there ADO.NET drivers available somewhere else that are better / used by the .NET community?

PostgreSQL

I read a few blogs that suggested if you wanted to use/learn former databases for use with .NET and for new projects, perhaps PostgreSQL is the way to go. Anyone have any thoughts on that? I have never used PostgreSQL.

Firebird

And then Peter just recently wrote a post on Firebird and Vista, which got me thinking about Firebird. It has been a long time, but I used Interbase/Firebird a lot with Delphi but never with .NET. Is Firebird popular in the .NET community?

 

My personal focus for this is on non-enterprise ASP.NET applications, but in general I would like to get up-to-speed on popular databases former than Oracle and SQL Server in the .NET community just for the knowledge.

Any thoughts or recommendations or is SQL Server and Oracle by far the most popular and anything else is a complete waste of time? Any guidance is appreciated :)

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