The Lair of the Pythia

Revised at updated: Feb/28/07

Because NativeExcel doesn’t yet handle reading range names I’ve been stuck with still using OLE in my application. Range names are pretty much essential if you are reading spreadsheets, because there’s generally no guarantee how much data you’ll be collecting or where it was put. But now I have a solution, thanks to Marco Cantu.
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OK, now that it looks like the upgrade path issue is on its way to being sorted, let’s talk about something happier. I have a third party library that I’m very pleased with.
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So, there were two major announcements from CodeGear yesterday, but the information available was so confusing that I decided to wait until after today’s Delphi Hour before posting anything. Here’s what I think the situation is:
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The latest piece of news to come out of CodeGear is a post by Steve Shaughnessy of their database team about the latest connectivity work. I don’t pretend to understand all of the talk about “delegate drivers”, but the thing that caught my eye was this:

The dbExpress 4 framework is single sourced so applications that use the dbExpress framework can be compiled for both win32 and the .net platform without any source code modification.

This is the sort of thing that makes application developers very happy.

And there’s more, I think. One of the things that caught my eye when looking at the Turbos was that the .NET version claimed that database applications developed using it would be portable between back-end databases without modification. (Well, except for things like connection strings.) So your clients can start off with something simple like, say, Access, and if their data requirements grow you can move easily to, say, SQL Server. The Win32 Turbo’s documentation does not claim this portability. But from what Steve has said it looks like Delphi 2007 (do I have to use the name Spacely?) will have that portability in all versions. I do hope so.

Of course that would be another nail in the coffin of the .NET compiler.

Various people have been commenting that Delphi is 12 years old today. Marco has the best post, combining it with a sneak preview of BDS 2007. The Vista stuff looks pretty. I guess I wouldn’t mind having a Vista system for development, as long as it was never connected to the Internet.

Also on Nick’s recent post is an announcement about some new hotfix patches for BDS2006. It would be nice when people make these announcements if they made clear whether they apply to the Turbos or not. I expect that they probably do as it does seem to be pretty much the same code, but it is always nice to be reassured that you won’t wreck your existing installation before adding an upgrade.

Update: Ah, good, it does apply to the Turbos. Thank you, Liz!

As per comments here, Nick Hodges has posted that the CodeRage conference will be free to attend. Not much to say to that except HOORAY!!!!

Various people (Marco, Dr. Bob) have mentioned today that CodeGear will be holding a virtual developers’ conference in March (more details here). Quite how this will work, I don’t know, but I’m rather hoping that if it doesn’t require the rental of a conference venue then it won’t cost a lot to attend. Us self-employed folks don’t get to shell out thousands on conference attendance.

Nick Hodges has put out a plea for people to help beta-test the next release of Delphi. I’d love to be part of the program, but I doubt that I’d have the time and I’m certain I don’t yet know the product well enough to do a good job. Still, it is very good to know that there is something new going to beta.

I’ve been quiet over the last few days as I’ve been busy coding and haven’t had time to write about it. However, in the process I did find something that may be of interest.

I do a lot of passing data back and fore between my software and Excel. I’ll hopefully write a lot more about this in future, but if anyone is interested Deborah Pate’s pages are a good place to start.

Anyway, as you probably know, OLE is horribly slow, so you need to minimize the number of calls you make. One of the ways you can do this is to transfer an entire range of cells at once, because then you just have one call, not one per cell.

When you do this, the cells that you transfer are in the form of a variant array. That’s normally not a problem. You can easily find out how big the array is and process it. I’m generally picking up a range name and grabbing the range it refers to. But beware, because in the rare case of the range you are transferring being a single cell in size, the variant that you get is no longer an array, it is a single variable, and if you try to refer to it as an array you’ll get an exception.

Variants are wonderful things, but they do also open up the possibility of coding errors like the above example that only show up with particular configurations of the data you are processing, and that can be very hard to test for in advance.