Well, first up, let me make one thing clear… people rave about Visual Studio and slag off Delphi… mostly it seems because Delphi is old. Well, old it may be, but from the perspective of the visual form designer, Delphi 5 is in my opinion still streets ahead of Visual Studios efforts. This could just be because I’ve not spent years learning all VS’s tricks, but I didn’t spend years learning Delphi’s either. Delphi 5 had some great tools which made laying out forms a snap.

As an example… tab order… when I layout a form, I very rarely stick the controls on it in the order I want the user to tab through them. So, in VS I have to select each control and tweak it’s tabIndex property… in Delphi, I right click the container, select ‘Tab order’ and up pops a dialog that allows me to simply drag and drop control names to set their tab order.

Alignment… why in gods name when I switch from Line layout to Grid layout in VS do I have to close the designer and then re-open it? Delphi can do that on the fly. And best of all, Delphi’s snap facilities at least appear to work well and make it a breeze to layout forms so they look nice.

Control overlap… why oh why when I layout a form in VS do the controls end up overlapping each other when I run the application? Why do things seemingly decide to change size on their own between when I design the form and when I execute it? These two issues alone have caused me numerous headaches and coupled with the appalling snapping in the designer… laying out forms in VS is a nightmare. I’ve never had this problem with Delphi, except when I start using the skinning facilities of the DevExpress controls… then they can change size, but just plain vanilla controls… if they don’t overlap at design time, they don’t overlap at runtime… unlike VS where they don’t overlap at design time, then at run time the controls overlap and render over one another.

Adding multiple instances of the same control… how do I add multiple instances of a control in VS, without having to go back to the toolbox and click it again and without using double click in the toolbox? In Delphi I simply select the component from the palette with Shift pressed and I can add a multitude of instances of that same control.

And that brings me nicely onto a major gripe… straight out of the box, the component set provided by VS is dire. I don’t use string grids very often, but just when I want to, I can’t because there isn’t one available in VS. Overall, the standard toolbox offering in VS is completely eclipsed by the good old Delphi VCL.

So, now I’ve used C# and Visual Studio for more than just a few minutes, do I have anything good to say? Well… not really no. I’m using it through necessity as I don’t want the headache of trying to get Delphi hooked up for writing PowerPoint add-ins. If Delphi provided an easy means of doing this I’d use it, but unfortunately it doesn’t, so I’m stuck with VS.

C# as a language is pretty good and fairly straight forward to switch to from Delphi, but there is one thing I really don’t like, and thats the fact there is no interface definition so it’s not so straight forward to see what your classes provide as you have to trawl through the actual functionality just to find out what methods are provided by the class.

So, that’s about all I have to say about VS and C#. I’m actually developing a product with it which I hope to release soon, so for the foreseeable future at least, I’m going to have to use VS, but given the choice between VS and C# or Delphi and Object Pascal… that requires only a split second to compute. Delphi would win most of the time, unless it’s tricky to achieve the desired result with it… for example, Windows Mobile development… that would be VS and C#.

I do find it quite interesting how most companies have gone down the VS and C# route when they could probably achieve the same results quicker with Delphi.

Disclaimer – These are my thoughts based on the short time I’ve been using VS and C#. As I’ve stated, it would be my weapon of choice for certain projects such as Office add-in and Windows Mobile development or building applications that need to be distributed on Win32 and Win64. But, overall, it’s just not my favourite tool.

Why am I writing anything about a language that isn’t new? Well, being a die hard Delphi fan-chick I thought my first foray into the world of C#, .net and Visual Studio may provide some useful insight to any other Delphi developers looking to move to the dark side

So, the project… right now, I’m preparing a big presentation for work. It’s a training course, and as such I have some things I want to do… these aren’t mind blowingly clever things, but PowerPoint out of the box just can’t do them without some pretty intensive labour. For example… macros at design time… you can’t (or at least I couldn’t find any way of doing it) have macros assigned to shortcut keys that run in the editor… you can’t even access useful events like ‘PresentationOpened’ without resorting to an add-in.

With this information in hand, I figured that I’d implement all the funky features I want in my own custom add-in. If it pans out and I can make it work well (so far it’s going really well all things considered) then I may release it as a low-cost commercial product for other budding presenters.

But enough of that… lets get into my thoughts.

The environment… the first thing is the obvious difference in keystrokes. Somethings that in Delphi require a single keypress require key combinations in Visual Studio. I know that the more I use it, the more conversant I’ll become with the GUI, but for some reason many of the keypress don’t follow logically. Take the Step Into, Step Over and Run buttons… Delphi, it’s F7, F8 and F9 respectively. VS it’s F11, F10 and F5 respectively… hardly a logical progression. In Delphi, F12 toggles between the visual form and it’s code… in VS, it’s F7 for the code and Shift+F7 for the visual form.

My next gripe… double clicking a C# source file in the project explorer in VS opens the editor with some HTML in it??? WTF? Double click means open the file I’m clicking in practically every other context I can think of, so why in VS does it open something else? Even using the ‘Open’ option from the popup menu results in the same thing! I’ll say it again… WTF???

The editor in VS is OK, I find some of it’s auto-formatting stuff a bit annoying because it ends up with code which isn’t in my natural style, but at least the code ends up looking fairly standardised without too much effort from me. The visual form designer seems a bit clunky somehow… I can’t quite put my finger on it, but suffice to say, I don’t think it’s as nice to use as Delphi’s.

So, I’m not overly impressed by the environment.

The language… I’ve said this many times to colleagues… a good software engineer will be able to pickup a new language and be productive with it in a matter of hours. Now not wanting to blow my own trumpet, but all things considered (new environment, first real use of the language, first Office add-in and first Office ribbon customisation) I would say I’ve done pretty well. The guts of my add-in are now complete and I can interact with my presentation in (for the most part) the manner I wanted to. I have a few small gripes but these are of my own making and I plan to fully tackle them later, but for now… I can setup the data I need, I can store information in the presentation and retrieve it… and the whole thing has only taken me about 8 hours (including time design icons). Most of this has been engineering the ribbon customisation.. it’s so picky and the documentation sucks. The help is appalling… for some reason my local help is limited to the Windows Mobile SDK so I have to go hunting for information on-line… great when I’m at home, but shite if I’m sat in an airport terminal with no WiFi. I’d like to say that Delphi’s help is better… in some respects it is… it’s all there, locally, out of the box, but compared to the help that shipped with Delphi 5, both VS and the later versions of Delphi suck when it comes to the help they provide.

Setting up the project… this was a snap… simply create a new project using the Visual Studio Tools for Office and you get the option to create an add-in. Add ribbon customisation as a project component and you’re away… it really is that easy. I’ve dabbled a little bit with the Windows Mobile SDK in the past, and creating an app for my smartphone was just as easy, so big up to Microsoft on that. Whilst I could probably do the same with Delphi, I just know that it would require lots of fiddling and faffing to get anywhere close to a working add-in. Who wants that hassle? Besides, I’m a firm believer in picking the right tool for the job and in this case VS and C# is it.

I was going to say, the one thing I really like about the VS editor is it’s region capabilities… but I just fired up Delphi 2009 and that supports regions… Cool

So what have I concluded from this first foray into the world of C# and VS… well… I’ve said for quite a while that what makes .net development difficult is the size of the libraries, and I stand by that. Some of it gets in the way, like nearly everything being an object… I know in Delphi there are lots of objects, but C# just seems to be a little too OO in places. Overall though, I’m pleased with the progress I’ve made and I’d be pretty happy to get into some more in-depth development with the tool set, but there are somethings I just don’t like. Classes for example… no definitions… just bang it all in the body of the class… it makes finding stuff a pain in the ass as you can’t just skim a header and jump to the implementation of the method like you can in Delphi, regions help but it’s still a nightmare. The use of ‘this’… in some places it seems to be required, but in other it doesn’t… this could just be my n00biness showing through, but when I’m in a class in Delphi I hardly ever use ‘self’.

Overall though, I’m pretty pleased and I hope to have my add-in finished with just a couple more hours of work, and well… I have now at least used it in anger… the question is, is that worthy of a place on my CV?

The tests were done with ACFW Version 0.82 and WordPress 3.0 (Beta 1).

For more information about the widget, check out my wiki.

I’m planning on moving more content to the wiki over the next few weeks, mainly because I find it easier to manage the content than I do when it’s published with WordPress.

Disclaimer - This fix is not for the faint hearted. If you are not happy about executing SQL, then don’t do this.

In fact, this is more than a fix just for the open_basedir error message I mentioned. If you have moved your blog, its possible that this problem is affecting you too. Whether or not you receive the error message about open_basedir depends on the version of PHP you are using and the configuration of PHP on your server.

The problem is caused because items uploaded via the media manager in WordPress are stored in the posts table and some of their path data is stored in the postmeta table, so even though you change the upload path in the config file and the miscellaneous options, these paths in postmeta remain unchanged.

The net result is, that when you move your blog to another host, if the OS/server is configured slightly differently, the paths that WordPress uses for locating the thumbnails for the uploaded images are drawn from postmeta which of course was created on a different host so the paths are different.

Now, ordinarily what might happen is the system will point the thumbnail at the full size image and have the browser scale it, BUT, with PHP 5 and it’s enhanced security, PHP might attempt to open a file which is in an area that you aren’t supposed to access. If this is the case, you’ll probably get an error message about trying to open a file outside open_basedir (or words to that effect) and instead of getting the thumbnail and options, you’ll get nothing except the error for that item.

The only way I’ve found to fix this is to run a bit of SQL against the database which corrects the now erroneous entries in postmeta.


UPDATE
wp_postmeta
SET
meta_value=concat('/var/www',right(meta_value,length(meta_value)-length('/home/httpd')))
WHERE
(meta_key="_wp_attached_file") AND
(instr(meta_value,'/home/httpd')>0)


This is the code I ran. You will need to adjust this, but what this does is looks for all postmeta records which have ‘/home/httpd’ at the start of them (this is the part of the old path which is different). We then update them by trimming off the ‘/home/httpd’ (done using the right(meta_value,length(meta_value)-length(‘/home/httpd’)) function) and sticking the new path component ‘/var/www’ on the front (done with the concat function).

So, in the postmeta table, all _wp_attached_file records that have /home/httpd at the start, have that replaced with /var/www, making them correct once more.

You can get the first edition of Pascal Gamer at the new website at http://www.pascalgamer.com.

Get your free copy of Pascal Gamer at http://www.pascalgamer.com

I spent several hours yesterday trying to get our issue tracker setup for registrations, of which the visual captcha is a part, and I also noticed the graphs weren’t working either. I tried numerous things including tweaking the headers and changing the output format (from JPEG to PNG). The interesting thing was that if I downloaded the image with a simple HTTP client written with Delphi, I could receive the image, stream it to disk and open it with Photoshop, but make the same request with a browser and there was nothing.

I even tried asking the guys in the Mantis channel on freenode, but the only person that replied couldn’t solve the problem. Then I remembered an issue I had with the file downloader I wrote for the PGDAnnual competition site… downloads were failing with that for no reason. Now I run PHP 5, like a lot of people, and I have output buffering turned on by default, and there in lies the problem.

If you are experiencing problems with images from scripts not working when all the other indicators suggest they should, or downloaders failing, turn off output buffering in the affected scripts and see if that helps. Just add the ‘ob_end_clean();’ command at the start of the script and check whether it helps.

I’ve solved several problems with scripts that generated/streamed content this way.

If you’re into Pascal, and developing games, why not give it a whirl. Head over to the competition website at PGDAnnnual.com for more information, and to sign up and enter.