Still time to enter the Darwin Race of Languages

Do you think that hand tweaked C code runs circles around managed code (C#, Java, VB.NET)?  Or do you think that your Just In Time compiled managed code gets the job done more securely than those bit sniffing dinosaurs?  Anxious to prove that Delphi is still relevant?  Want to win some cutting edge component libraries from DevExpress?

If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, there is still time to enter the Darwin Race of Languages.  The brainchild of Sevensteps CTO Bart Roozendaal, the Darwin Race is pitting a slate of challengers using the compiler and IDE of their choice to write a utility that will solve one of three problems.  The projects are the following:

• Temperatures and CPU load
  A utility that will measure CPU temperatures and CPU load on remote computers
• Multi clipboard utility
  The utility should hold several entries that were place on the clipboard earlier. In effect it should replace the clipboard.
• GUI to a command line program
  A GUI front end for the gbak database command line driven program for the Firebird database.

Each entry will be judged on the software itself and how you documented the design and development of the application.  The goal is not to see which development is best tool, but to see what tools are the best for different types of jobs.  To see where the strengths are and where are the weaknesses of each tool, using real world types of the problems.  The documentation part will share the development process and show how different people come up with solutions for similar problems.

There are already a bunch of sponsors lined up.  DevExpress will be giving away a a license for DXperience Enterprise or the VCL Subscription.  If you wint, you get to pick one of them.  I have DXperience and most of the VCL components, you can’t go wrong with either one of them.

The race is on already, but there is still time to join.  There are a bunch of participants already signed up, covering C#, Delphi, VB, and something on the Mac platform.  Java is not yet represented, does someone out there want to pick up the Java gauntlet?

When will the Visual Studio IDE catchup to the Delphi IDE?

Sometimes it just the little things that annoy you.  If I add a button to a Delphi form, by default it is named Button1.  If I double click on Button1, a Click event handler is added and is named Button1Click and wires it up to the button's OnClick event.  Visual Studio does pretty much the same thing.  Where they is differ is when you edit the button's name.

If I renamed Button1 to something more meaningful like DestroyAllMonsters, the Delphi IDE will rename the event handler to DestroyAllMonstersClick.  When you rename the button in the Visual Studio IDE, it doesn't touch the event handler.  That's annoying.

Another difference is how Delphi handles event handlers when your delete the code or never add the code.  When you double click on the button and get the new event handler automagically created and wired up to the control, that event handler has no code.  If you save that file, Delphi removes the event handler.  it does under the assumption that you didn't mean to have that event handler and it will clean up the code for you.  Like wise, if you delete the code out of the handler and save the file, Delphi will remove the handler. 

This makes it easy to cleanup code when you remove a control that you didn't really want or need any more.  Visual Studio doesn't do that for you, or least not in C#.  When you spend your day working in both IDE's at the same time, those types of annoyances really can be annoying.