(Items marked with an Asterisk * are non-free)

Delphi Tools

GExperts – Every Delphi Developer should have GExperts, adding a fantastic selection of features to the Delphi IDE and Editor.

cnWizard IDE – Quite a few commenters suggested adding cnWizard IDE here, I’ve never actually tried it but did consider it against GExperts. What put me off was the relatively uninformative website (yes, shallow of me but I can’t help it!).

DelphiCodeToDoc Options

DelphiCodeToDoc – Generate documentation from your Delphi Source comments, including JavaDoc compatible comments. DelphiCodeToDoc is open source and can generate Windows Help Files or HTML Documentation (or both).

SmartInspect* - This is a commercial product which gives you amazing code logging features for Delphi, .NET and Java applications (and even PHP too now which I also find useful). No more inserting breakpoints, watches and spurious ShowMessages()’s just to track the variables in an application. Even allows Remote Logging when an executable is deployed on a different machine. Saved me from a particuarly frustrating problem in a remote app recently.

SmartInspect Console

Innosetup – A Free installer which allows you to create fully customisable installers which support nearly every version of windows and even 64 bit architectures. I’ve also found it to be just as functional and much easier to use than some of it’s expensive competitors.  Did I mention it’s also free?

MemCheck – Not really an application per se. Not fully Delphi 2009 compatible yet but this is a useful little unit that means adding a single line to your project file and then creates a log file of the memory leaks in your application.

WAnt –  A Delphi specific Build Automation tool in the same fashion as the Java Ant tool. I looked into this tool recently because I wanted a way to automatically Checkout, Build and Test the Dwitterphi project that I’m working on so I know when the SVN Trunk has been broken.

Editors / IDEs

Programmers Notepad 2 – A General Purpose Notepad replacement which includes Syntax highlighting support, bookmarks, code folding, project and project group support and all the usual gubbins which you would expect from a lightweight notepad replacement.

Zend Studio* – My copy is a few years old, before they switched to Eclipse. I’m actually looking at replacing this with something newer and free.

Zend Development Environment (older version)

Eclipse – Needs no real introduction. A Base for so many tools. I also use the RadRails package for Rails and Ruby Development.

Version Control / File Comparison

Beyond Compare 3* – An amazing File Comparison utility with 3 way merge capability, folder sync capabilities, specialised viewers for various file types and remote comparison tools. I’ve mentioned it many times before but this is an essential tool for developers.

Beyond Compare 3

Toroise SVN – Easy to use interface for Subversion which integrates beautifully with the Windows Shell. My only gripe with this particular tool is that it seems to bug you often to download the latest updates when they should by now have implemented an auto-update feature.

SVNMonitor – Only Recently suggested to me by @dmiliam via Twitter. I installed it and found it tremendously useful for keeping tabs on whats happening with a SVN Repository.

Internet

SmartFTP* – There are a million FTP Clients out there, some are free with comparable features to SmartFTP but none come close to the overall package and polish that SmartFTP represents including support for FTPS and SFTP and very smooth transfer queues and folder sync features.

FeedDemon – Developed in Delphi by Nick Bradbury. It’s considered very cool to use Google Reader nowadays but you can’t beat the stability and power of a Desktop Reader and FeedDemon has it all. Fast and efficient, especially good when combined with the NewsGator Online Sync Service that allows me to sync unread/read items to my Work PC or even my Blackberry with NewsGator Go! and catch up with news on the go. Sync with Google Reader is also on the way. FeedDemon FTW.

FeedDemon 3

twhirl – I prefer twhirl as my Twitter client of choice as it isn’t as big and bulky as TweetDeck but all that will change when there is a great native win32 twitter client.

Browser

FireFox – No explaination neccessary really.

• Web Developer Toolbar – Simply indispensable for those who spend a great deal of time crafting Browser content or applications.
• YSlow – I’ll be honest: I’ve never had a site that is big enough to need the level of optimisation that Yahoo.com does but the advice this tool gives is sound and it will help you to identify bottlenecks in your sites performance.
• FireBug - Edit, debug, and monitor HTML, CSS and JavaScript live in any web page.

Google Chrome – Used for Day to Day browsing because it’s an order of magnitude faster than almost any other browser out there in general browsing (Just my opinion).

SuperPreview – A fabulous tool from Microsoft unveiled at Mix09 which allows you to view web pages in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 as well as your other browsers whilst allowing you to super-impose expected layouts on top of one another to see how the renderings differ. No more hefty VMs required for testing layouts.. great success!

Shell / Miscellaneous

Open Command Window Here shortcute

Command Prompt Here - A hugely underrated and disarmingly simple shell extension which adds an “Open Command Prompt Here” sub-item to the context menu in Windows Explorer. No more cd “C:really really really long path name” for these users.

UltraMon* – This improves the Multi-Monitor support in Windows hugely, something that if you haven’t tried it, try it now! Monitor specific task bars, extra system buttons on each window, wallpaper and desktop icon management. Ultramon is so useful that I’m suprised it hasn’t already been acquired by Microsoft like the SysInternals team were.

ProcessExplorer from SysInternals

SysInternals – From by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, The best set of power user utilities available out there, Acquired by Microsoft a few years ago. My personal favourites are:

• Process Explorer – Think of the windows task manager on steroids, double it and then add more.
• Autoruns – Comprehensive lists of everything starting up when your computer does.
• ps* Utils – Lightweight remote versions of your favourite windows commands.

VirtualBox – A Free and Open Source VM competitor to Microsoft VirtualPC and VMWare etc. Not as polished as VMWare in some parts of the user interface or networking features but very usable and getting much better with every release.

Window Clippings* – Recommended to me by marc hoffman (although how he knew about it – primarily being a mac user I’m not sure). A very easy Screenshot and Window Clipping tool. Great features, addons available and inexpensive. Everyone has their own preference for a Screenshot tool so whilst I would completely recommend this, I wouldn’t push for you to change over any other.

Power Toys – An amazing set of utilities that add to windows.

SyncToy 2 - A File and Folder Synchronisation tool that I use to keep files backed up to my home servers and which I will use to Sync important indispensable files (music!) to my NetBook when I finally purchase it!

This isn’t a completely comprehensive list (I’m not going to dump a list of everything from Windows Add/Remove Programs!) but I’d love to hear if you think I’m missing out on any spectacularly useful utilities for Delphi or Web Development. Hopefully you found at least one utility in this list that you’ve been putting off trying and have realised why I found it to be useful.

After a bit of Googling I was tipped off to the idea that my XML File could contain non-visible invalid XML Characters. Trying to open the XML file in Internet Explorer confirmed this suspicion as it threw up a rather unhelpful and non-descriptive error. I tried opening the document up in a Hex editor but the document was large and my untrained eye could not locate the problematic character(s) amongst the valid ones. After taking a few excellent suggestions on Twitter I tried opening the file in Altova’s XML Spy didn’t help correct the document as it claimed the document to be “well-formed”. After a little bit of Googling for XML Document Inspection solutions I stumbled upon a newsgroup post mentioning using Dave Raggett‘s excellent HTML Tidy Utility (which can, contrary to it’s name, be used for a lot more than HTML!).

By running the Tidy tool with the command line arguments:

tidy -mi my_broken_xmlfile.xml

This instructs tidy to indent and prettify the xml file (which I would always recommend for any XML File in development) and to modify the original file. In the process of Indenting and Prettifying it removes any invalid characters which make the document invalid. You could also write the Tidy’d XML file to a separate file using the -o output-file option instead. I then used Scooter Software’s fantastic Beyond Compare tool to view the difference(s) between the old and new versions in order to check what changes had been made.  

Incidentally, Beyond Compare is an invaluable tool for any developer allowing Both Local and Remote Comparisons, 3 way merging of documents and even folder comparisons (remote or local: very useful for websites).

Oxford Geek Night 10 looking very crowded. Photo by garrettc

The two 15 minute keynotes for the evening were Elliot Jay Stocks with a talk on “The Trouble with Type” and Sylwia Presley with a talk on “Twitter Ethics”.

Elliot Jay Stocks went first and critisised the powerfully misguiding font selection dialog in Adobe Dreamweaver which seems to allow you to select almost any font you have on your computer. Sadly, as we know, It doesn’t work like that so instead he went on to cover two approaches to font-embedding. The @font-face CSS declaration which is supported in most but not all new browsers (FF3.1, Opera 10, Modern WebKit based ones). The problem with this is that it doesn’t protect the font in any way such that the font can be downloaded using the URL found in the source (which is a problem if you’ve paid for a licensed font). The other problem is that IE doesn’t support it, instead choosing to use their own Font-Embedding technique which does allow .eot fonts to be protected and for different levels of embedding permissions. EJS went on to recommend that people use a mixture of the two however I’d guess that using a licensed commercial font with @font-face (and thus unprotected) probably puts you up against the providers license terms (and possibly legal team?). My take-away from this talk was that if you’re using commercial fonts there isn’t a perfect solution yet so possibly best to stick with sIFR.

The next talk was by Sylwia Presley about Twitter Ethics in which she drew from variety of different people to try to work out some of the Ethics and Etiquette behind the tool. Sylwia did an admirable job of explaining some of the conventions of Twitter but seemed to lose the crowd for the first 5 minutes as she explained what Twitter was and what it was used for (I suspect 99-100% of the crowd were already Tweeting). The key take away from this talk seemed to be that spamming links to your own blog or to your company website will quickly get you blocked by any followers that you did have. She also mentioned the upcoming Twestival which is a World Wide event on the 11th February attempting to gather Twitterers for the purposes of raising money for charity and having fun.

After a short break and a chat we resumed for 3 5-Minute Microslots.

• Drew McClellan gave us a rundown on the various ways of using the CSS rgb() and rgba() declarations using a rather entertaining example on Bagpuss. rgba is a CSS3 Declaration which allows you to set the Alpha channel of a colour. This has many advantages over setting the opacity in situations where you don’t want the whole element to have it’s opacity set.  
• Bruce Lawson gave a short and to the point talk on BS 8878 which is a draft website accessibility standard. The talk did not cover the ins and outs of the spec, as would have been tough in 5 minutes, but was informative on the subject of why it is relevant and why we should strive to adhere to it.
• Peet Morris then gave a short talk titled “Microserfs”, the main point of which got a little lost in the chaos but, which was a thoroughly entertaining to the Developers in the room. Peet was one of the original MS Developers on the Windows 3.x project and had some interesting (and funny) experiences to impart to us. Peet overran by about 5 minutes but thankfully noone interupted as he hadn’t really gotten to the “meat” of the presentation by the end of the first 5!

After another short break and a pint on Google (who sponsor the event) we had another 3 Microslots lasting 5 minutes each.

•  Tom Dyson of Torchbox gave a very interesting talk on Dynamic Demand and his new website caniturniton.com which interprets the frequency of the national grid and assumes it’s load, telling you whether you can safely turn on your kettle. This would have been most welcome at Homecamp where we were looking for an API for this data. Tom also made an appeal for more people to try to get involved with the creation on an XMPP service for this which a device like an Arduino could use to dynamically turn home appliances on and off as a result. I should also thank Tom for introducing me to LetsTurnThisF***ingWebsiteYellow.com which is the best single serving site I’ve seen in a while!
• David Sheldon of music streaming site We7.com then gave a talk on Tomcat and scaling it past one machine. This was a good talk to attend as a nice overall introduction to scaling websites past one machine and whilst I don’t use Apache Tomcat myself, the concepts that he explained could be used for other environments too. I also had the pleasure of meeting David in the bar queue and he was good enough to show me some very interesting Android applications running on his G1 but that’s something for another post. 
• Tim Davies gave the last talk on the evening on Social Media and the Youth. This contained some sneaky user interface tweaks which developers can use to highlight responsible behaviour by young people using Social networks. 

As more people left the event early (some before the main keynotes has finished) it became much easier to move around the event and talk to people as well as to find a seat. If the Oxford Geek Night continues to grow then I suspect that they will need a larger venue very soon.With so many people attending it seemed harder to introduce yourself to people but I met lots of interesting people and it was good to have a geek-gossip about various things. Thank-you to Torchbox, Google, Moo and Pearson Education for their sponsorship of the event and to the organisers.

Once installed PicLens places a small translucent play button over photos on supported sites when you put your mouse over them. Supported sites include:

It also supports any site which uses the mediaRSS format. Once activated the PicLens plugin opens up a fantastic full screen app for viewing photos. Danny recently announced version 1.6 which includes a fantastic new feature called “the wall” which displays your photos in all their glory in a 3D environment allowing a fun and very easy way to skip through a photostream as shown below in the screenshot I capped of my own photostream.

I would highly recommend that everyone downloads this plugin, I have never found a more pleasurable interface to browsing photos. Rendering is smooth and satisfying and I wish to congratulate Danny and the team for their excellent work!

It began with a disgruntled rant from Zed Shaw who was responsible for the Mongerel engine for rails. Zed seems to be disheartened with the Rails development community on the whole and whilst his rant is a little bit immature in places, it is worth a read as with every argument there is elements of truth and elements of fantasy. The basis of this rant was the allegedly poor attitude of the Core Rails Dev team towards the deployment of Rails apps.

Recently a provocative post appeared on the DreamHost blog titled How Ruby could be much bettter. Its an interesting piece which lashes out at Rails for its poor performance as a platform for Shared Hosting environments. I would have to agree with most of this post. I very much enjoy writing Rails applications, it is very good at simplifying data driven web apps and I sometimes wish that PHP had something similarly easy out of the box (yes I know about the various 3rd party frameworks) however after deploying my first production rails app I quickly relegated it to a pure hobby language. Was it really that bad? In a word: Absolutely. Almost anyone who has tried to deploy a rails app on shared hosting will agree with me, it is 50 times more complicated to deploy than anything else I’ve ever toyed with.

DHH then responded and stated that people should quit whining and get involved. I agree with this, DreamHost and other Rails hosts should spend more time and energy working with the core rails team however I don’t agree with DHH on one thing: He states that there is no motivation for him to improve this himself.

I couldn’t disagree more with this. DHH as the “public leader” of the Rails community is always pushing the point that Rails is the “quick and painless” way do web development. If he wants this to be true then he has to realise that the majority of the web is composed of small sites. Sites which cannot afford nor justify a dedicated server. Sites which must be served on shared hosting. I would argue that Rails can never be taken seriously as a language unless it is easy to deploy whether that be on dedicated equipment or on shared hosting and no-one who has tried rails can argue that in its current state it is easy to deploy on either.