Allen Bauer's blog...

Have you ever played that fun party game "Rumor?" It's the one where you and your friends form a circle. One person starts at some point on the circle and whispers a sentence to the person to their left or right. That person in turns has to repeat that exact sentence to the next person and so on. What is funny is that by the time this "Rumor" makes it around the circle, it will bear little or no resemblance to the original statement... Sometimes with hilarious consequences.

It seems the blogshpere is turning into a huge "Rumor" game... case in point Delphi 9.0, Helper classes and GC :-)..

Uh... there is no Delphi 9.0, and helper classes have nothing really to do with the IDisposable pattern... No big deal, I'm just surprised that my blog is indirectly linked.

Nick's Newsgroup Manifesto

The most excellent dude, Nick, has a few works on how one should approach and behave in the Borland newsgroups. And, I for one can attest to being cajoled, pestered and irritated personally by Nick :-o... no matter how good he thinks he looks...

Thank you for all your responses to my question about IDE incident reports. You have certainly confirmed my suspisions that many folks would find this a very reasonable and useful addition to the IDE. However, some comments did mention some legitimate concerns. Here's how I'm thinking it will work.

When an exception is raised in the IDE (remember not all exceptions indicate that there is a "defect" or "bug", thus the term "incident."), a slightly modified error dialog is displayed that includes an extra "Details" button. When this is pressed, the dialog will unfold to reveal a listbox containing a detailed stack trace from the origin of the exception. That by itself would probably be extremely useful to the component developer even without the next feature.

On the dialog, there is now a "Send" button that will display a wizard that will walk the person through the process of gathering additional information in order to send a copy of this detailed report back to Borland. They are given the opportunity to supply a description and possibly reproducable steps that are added to the report. They will also have the option of supplying their Quality Central user id/password so that the report will be sent as being reported by them and will allow them to query the QC database for all their "Incident Reports" and track their status. If they don't want to do this, they can choose to report anonymously, at which point the report will only be seen by QC Sysops. All reports are marked as private such that only QC Sysops and the reporting individual can see their incidents until a QC Sysop makes them public. This will tend to keep the number of redundant publicly visible reports to a minimum and allow for a more formal review process.

The whole point of this is to not be overbearing and intrusive. The user can elect to install or uninstall the add-in. The user is in full control over when and what reports are sent back. Just like the integrated Windows XP crash reporting system, this allows the user to choose when to send the information. However, unlike the Microsoft version, you can actually see the reports in the publicly available Quality Central database. They don't merely disappear into some random bit-bucket on some mystery server up in Redmond, WA...

If you're interested in becoming a Quality Central Sysop, please read the Quality Central Sysop Guide.

Stay tuned for more information on this.

Delphi Compiler Core

You wanted it, so now you have it. Danny Thorpe has joined the venerable ranks of Borland Bloggers... welcome aboard Danny! Also, Anders Ohlsson has started his own blogging experiment...

I may come to regret this ;-)... however I was wondering if folks would find an IDE add-in that would trap all exceptions, provide a stack trace, and give the user the opportunity to send this information back to Borland in the form of a Quality Central incident report? Please use the Comments link to let me know. Please keep the comment to a minimum. Things like, "That would be awesome!" or "I'd rather Borland QA the product." are fine. However, long diatribes about a specific issue you're having are counter productive to the intent and spirit of the question.

NOTE: There is currently a problem with the comment code that doesn't refresh the comment window when you submit your comment so it appears as if the comment wasn't accepted. So please only press "Submit" button only once.