Two Decades, Eh?

Well, well, well, it turns out I’ve been working for myself for two decades now! I left Borland in January 1995, thinking I could manage maybe about 5 years if I was lucky and did well before I got another full time job. And now we’re in 2015! How time flies when you’re having fun :o)

Oh yeah, and a couple of weeks after I left my last employed job Delphi 1 came out, and that was awesome too! And my oh my, it’s nearly the 20th anniversary of the launch date of this great programming language: Feb 14th 1995.

To celebrate this milestone, Embo is hosting an online Delphi Week leading up to the Feb 14th launch date anniversary, Feb 9th to 13th. You can read more about it on this community news post and this community event post. Do read up on it and try and join in – it should be fun :o)

Off to Australia to talk at ADUG Symposium 2015

I’m delighted to be able to announce that I’m off to Australia in March to do some talks at the ADUG Symposium 2015!

It’s a long way to travel, but I’m really looking forward to talking to the ADUG members about Delphi XE7 in both Melbourne and Canberra.

I’ve got a couple of talks scheduled in. I’ll be talking about consuming Android OS features that are outside the scope of what the FMX framework wraps up, and also looking at creative debugging techniques.

Hopefully I’ll manage to shed the jetlag in the few days prior to the event, when I shall be enjoying the delights of Melbourne, and then after the 2 events I’ll soak up Canberra before returning back to normality.

Thanks for inviting me along, ADUG – I can’t wait to join you in Australia!

Delphi and Android services (part 3)

Once upon a time I uploaded a Delphi sample app to the Google Play Store, written in Delphi XE5 and implementing an Android service. I wrote about the published app in this post and supplied the source in this follow-up post.

There was an issue that’s been hanging around with that sample project. When pulled into Delphi XE7 and updated so it all compiled nicely, it didn’t play ball when deployed. Instead it hung.

I’ve eventually worked through the to-do list enough to take a look at the problem. For one reason or another starting the service in the OnCreate event handler caused an issue thanks to some required thread synchronisation, which no longer functions as I wanted it to.

I’ve worked around the problem by very slightly delaying the service starting by use of a one-shot timer. Then the form setup is done and dusted by the time the service is invoked and all seems to be well.

An updated download archive is available here, which contains the original Delphi XE5 project and a Delphi XE7 equivalent, which should now be functionally equivalent.

Another update has been made to the project download, which now contains Delphi XE8 support. Delphi 10 Seattle introduces its own support for native Android services, but Delphi XE8 / Lollipop made some changes that broke the demo as it was originally written. The XE8 version of the project should hopefully resolve that problem.