Bill Meyer

To remember when things were documented is to be old.

Also keep in mind that they've told us for 20 years now that we don't understand marketing. Perhaps not -- I certainly do not understand THEIR marketing. But in my career I have learned a good deal about customer retention. According to LinkedIn, his title is now: Mergers and Acquisitions Executive Advisor at Embarcadero Technologies. And that does not seem to be marketing.

Smacked myself on the forehead over that. Thanks.

Installed Delphi 10.3.1 Starter Edition the other day on my personal machine. Although the experience so far is generally positive, I note that with the IDE on my screen 2, when I run my app, the IDE moves to screen 1, and the app opens there, as well. Thoroughly unpleasant behavior, and quite unexpected after so many years of multi-screen operation in Windows. I see RSP-12271 and RSP-12956. The earlier case is now nearly 4 years old. One might think such a behavior would get quick attention.

Many do use VMs. Many did not in the days of D5..7.

As with most generalizations, there is probably some truth in your comments. That said, the relatively small number of books I have acquired from Packt have been better than average. In particular, they have done a very nice job with e-books, which for code, are notoriously difficult to format well. Very few publishers will consider a Delphi title any more, so self-published books and books from Packt or perhaps Manning are among the few available resources. Packt also publishes some very capable authors, and I certainly number @Primož Gabrijelčič among them. Self-publishing is not a valid condemnation, either. Our own @Dalija Prasnikar published a very worthwhile volume on memory management in Delphi. (Full disclosure: I did assist with proofreading and editing on her book.) Equally, some self-published books on Delphi have been pretty disappointing. Software development books appear most often for well marketed language tools, whether they are expensive or free. One metric I have watched is price per page. When that goes higher than five to eight cents, the book better be excellent. Sadly, that is not often the case.

Maybe. But I thought I remembered having been able to "buy" a free special at the $0.00 price in the past.

Do you have an account registered? That may be the key to getting the free download. I've found the site a little confusing, but once you have a title, you have it registered under your login, and can access it repeatedly.

Worth watching for insights into the value of a language server:

The history of stupid licensing conditions in the USA is as old as shrink-wrapped EULAs. The one ray of hope was the original Borland "just like a book" policy.

Had an unpleasant experience with the license server last year, which necessitated a new slip file. Although the license shows perpetual, there is a subscription expiration date in the license, and that seemed to be an impediment if it became necessary to install new, as in creating a new VM. Also, the license server "solution" requires that Delphi be able to reach the server at least every 30 days.

Wow. Masterful marketing. This will make it easy for any who have considered dropping off to do so. For years, we have been assured that developers simply don't understand marketing. That may be true, but clearly we are not alone in that deficiency.

"Most highly valued" is not equivalent to "most valuable."

Coming into a project which has built for years on the philosophy that a "sole developer" could deal with things, and then success led to 10 or more developers, I have to say I think it is best to plan for success. Legacy code is too often very ugly.

Not an option for me at this time. The current solution seems to work correctly, but with an attachment, and where Outlook is the default client and gmail the recipient address, there is a second, phantom attachment. It proves to be 32K of memory image. Where the default client is Thunderbird, or where the destination is not gmail, we do not see the phantom attachment. Also, the phantom does not exist unless we pass a recipient address in the call to send MAPI; if we pass only the attachment name(s), then no secondary is created.