Cranking up the dynamic environments with Puppet

I recently completed and deployed a personal project which turned out to require rather more computing power than I’d originally estimated. To fuel this demand, I opened a Rackspace cloud account to host my development and production environments and began configuring my environment as I wanted it. If you haven’t used Rackspace cloud before, I [...]

tgrep challenge

I thought many of you might enjoy a little programming challenge that I came across. I’ve long been a fan of reddit, and especially the programming and delphi sub reddits. reddit, who seem to finally be getting the support that they need, posted an interesting job ad about 8 months ago, which seemed like a nice [...]

Delivering software continuously and why you should

I’ve recently really been getting into a Software Delivery methodology which for me, wraps up a selection of the most potent benefits of Agile, TDD, Continuous Integration which requires Development and Operations to work very closely. Holy cow, all those flashy words in a single description, that must mean this is some enterprisey buzzwordy new [...]

Open source kindness and a Delphi yajl update

I’m always pleasantly surprised at the generosity of the Delphi community when it comes to helping other developers or open source efforts. There are many places to host open source code, each community usually has a particular bias towards one system (.NET langs towards Codeplex, Python langs towards BitBucket, Ruby and Javascript to Github). The [...]

F# for a Delphi Programmer

When Visual Studio 2010 was released and it included a large number of great new features, one of which in particular was portrayed as a stealth revolution by an article in The Register: F#. F# is a new .NET based functional programming language which emerged from Microsoft’s Cambridge Research lab as the primary focus of Don [...]

Flying with MEF in Delphi Prism

The Managed Extensibility Framework (or MEF for short)  has been around the .NET world for a while but I thought I might go through my foray into using MEF with Delphi Prism. MEF is a new library in .NET Framework 4 and Silverlight 4 that addresses the problem of easily extending and componentising applications by [...]

Time to get the Delphi community back

I’ve been a long time lurker and enjoyer of reddit. I find that the content post to proggit is much much better than that posted to similar services. One element of programming.reddit that has always made me quite sad is the apparent lack of fresh Delphi content submitted. I recently started trying to post more content [...]

New Goodies in Delphi Prism 2011

As the announcements have recently proclaimed: Delphi Prism 2011 is out now and the Software Assurance emails went out particularly quickly after the announcements (great work team embarcadero!). I thought I might share what I’ve found to be new and cool in the Delphi 2011 Release. Visual Studio 2010 Support I’ll start with the most obvious [...]

Warblecamp

I spent this weekend at the rather smart Guardian offices at King’s place near King’s Cross to visit Warblecamp and I thought I’d write up my thoughts on some of what I’d learned. WarbleCamp is a free unconference style event for the UK/Euro Twitter developer community which was held at the offices of the guardian. I [...]

Converting C headers is hard – yajl for Delphi

Introduction I have been toying with the idea of trying to convert the yajl parser bindings to Delphi in order to build a wrapper on top of the original C dll. yajl (Yet Another JSON Library) is a small fast SAX style JSON parser written and open sourced in C over at lloyd’s yajl GitHub [...]