Bob Swart

Robert Meek has written a book review about my Delphi 2009 Development Essentials, which is sold as paperback from Lulu.com, or offered as free bonus for anyone who purchases Delphi or one or more courseware manuals in PDF format from me. ... (more)

XML's Contribution to Web Services

Professional XML Web Services isn't really an XML book, but more a pure Web services book. The XML part is because XML is used to represent Web services (in the WSDL, for example). The book covers many types of Web services, not just XML Web services (a term that's like a binary executable). The book consists of 15 chapters. That's not much, if you take into account that it was written by 12 authors. In fact, no author has written more than two chapters. I must admit that my feelings about the result are mixed. Some chapters flow really well and are clear to read, but others take ... (more)

Enterprise Core Objects III

For those of you who haven't seen it before, I've written a series of articles for the electronic Bitwise Magazine on Enterprise Core Objects II (with as main example this ASP.NET weblog application that you're currently looking at). Since the release of Delphi 2006, I've been working with Enterprise Core Objects III, the successor of ECO II, and I've been migrating (or more rebuilding) my weblog application using some of the new ECO III features. ... (more)

CodeGear RAD Studio 2009 Trial with Delphi Prism ISO

You can now download the CodeGear RAD Studio 2009 Trial with Delphi Prism ISO (at 1.4 GB), and request a trial key, in order to install a 14-day trial edition of the Delphi Prism portion of RAD Studio 2009 (or, if you already have a real key for RAD Studio 2009 or Delphi Prism 2009, you can use that key to install the full non-expiring version of Delphi Prism). ... (more)

Delphi 2009 Implicit String Conversion Penalties

When migrating existing source code from previous versions of Delphi to Delphi 2009, you may encounter warnings about implicit conversions from AnsiString to Unicode Strings or vice versa (the other way may also have a potential data loss) and while it's easy to ignore these warnings, ignorance comes with a price! The particular real-world example I want to talk about in this post comes from a third-party library (who shall remain nameless) compatible with different versions of Delphi, including Delphi 2009. When I migrated my project from Delphi 2007 to Delphi 2009, the resultin... (more)