The Art of Intrusion

Well, today I received interesting book, titled The Art of Intrusion written by Kevin D. Mitnick and William L. Simon. Well if you are a computer geek or hacker (at any levels) I think you know who Kevin Mitnick is, right?

This book covers the real stories behind the exploits of hackers, intruders and deceivers. This book consists of 11 chapters from Hacking the Casinos for a Million Bucks, the Robin Hood Hackers to Social Engineers. Well it is nice days having read this book.

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24 Hours of DeXter

Continuing the 24 hours of Delphi, Borland presented 2nd event, now it talks about DeXter. You can listen it at Borland streaming system. Uh, I cant listen all the conversations, I just can only listen for 1 – 2 hours.

I just hopefully someone record this event as mp3 or similiar so I can listen it later.

Thinking about Delphi 2006

Delphi 2006 is not Delphi anymore. Oh, dont be sad and confused, Delphi still Delphi and still being our favourite development tool. According to Borland press release about Delphi 2006 announcement and its datasheet, Delphi 2006 is part of Borland Developer Studio 2006. The package is also contain C++Builder 2006 and C#Builder 2006. Wow, we got multi-languages feature-rich rapid application development tool ever. But the names may confuse people since if you buy BDS 2006 or Delphi 2006 or C++ Builder 2006 or C# Builder 2006 or whatever you named it, you get the same bundle product.

Ok, lets stop about the names. Now, how about its new features offered. Based on features and key highlights listed in Delphi 2006 datasheet and feature summary from Marco Cantu blogs, my interested features are about how IDE provides us subset features to speed our productivity up such as more refactorings, VCL live guidelines, live templates and block completion. The full-blown version of Together for Delphi provides two-way class diagram modeling, UML diagram suite, audit and metrics and document generation from source code and model.

A faster memory manager by using FastMM4 and speed improvement by using some of FastCode projects bring us faster IDE startup, responsive and quite stable environment and also improve project and application load speed dramatically.

Debugging is even improved and enhanced with remote debugging, expandable evaluator, tooltips, watches, local variables view and selective symbol table loading.

The ECO III allow us to define state machine, overloaded OCL expressions, improved UML designer and many more. The new database explorer, BDP connection pooling, BDP SQL tracing and Datahub error reconciliation for .NET platform. BDS2006 is also integrated Borland Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) products such as StarTeam User Experience, StarTeam Server and CaliberRM User Experience.

Web development is even easier with ASP.NET tag editor and source preservation and rapid web building with IntraWeb 8.

In the other hand, I didnt see any information about improvements and optimizations on the compiler sides. Has Delphi compiler used modern compilation concept and techniques, I dont know.

The last thing, I hope Delphi 2006’s quality, performance and stability are back since Delphi 2005’s are out of my expectation. Well, in order to get more information about Delphi 2006, at least, I have to wait till December 2005 or January 2006 to get Delphi 2006 run on my machine.

Small Pieces of DeXter Within DiamondBack

Well, this is true. You can get small pieces of DeXter features within your DiamondBack (Delphi2005). You can get them only if you patched your Diamondback with unofficial patch created by Allen Bauer. This patch itself requires Delphi 2005 Update 3, so ensure you have patched your Diamondback with Update 3, otherwise, it will be fail.

So what the unofficial patch does? The most important things are about performance and stability. The interesting part is that Borland changed BorlandMM, the old ancient slow memory manager with FastMM4, a really fast memory manager replacement created by Pierre le Riche.

The unofficial patch contains eight files, boreditu.dll, Borland.Studio.Vcl.Design.dll, coreide90.bpl, coreide90.jdbg, desingide90.bpl, designide90.jdbg, vclide90.bpl and vclide90.jdbg. You need to download FastMM in order to complete the patch. You can manually install the patch, but it is recomended that you use automatic installer created by Andreas Hausladen.

So how to validate unofficial patch works correctly, its really easy. Just open the Delphi About dialog box and it will say anything. Look at the label located at the bottom of dialog box, its a red colored label said ‘Confidential pre-release version text.

The next interesting thing is about version info. You’ve got different version info for several Borland libraries. Lets look some of them below.

• bds.exe, 9.0.1935.22056, C:\Program Files\Borland\BDS\3.0\Bin\
• boreditu.dll, 9.0.1882.30496, C:\Program Files\Borland\BDS\3.0\Bin\
• borland.studio.delphi.dll, 9.0.1935.22056, c:\program files\borland\bds\3.0\bin\
• coreide90.bpl, 9.0.2043.16517, C:\Program Files\Borland\BDS\3.0\Bin\
• coreproide90.bpl, 9.0.1882.30496, c:\program files\borland\bds\3.0\Bin\
• dbkdebugide90.bpl, 9.0.1935.22056, C:\Program Files\Borland\BDS\3.0\Bin\
• dbkdebugproide90.bpl, 9.0.1882.30496, c:\program files\borland\bds\3.0\Bin\
• delphicoreide90.bpl, 9.0.1882.30496, C:\Program Files\Borland\BDS\3.0\Bin\
• designide90.bpl, 9.0.2043.16517, C:\Program Files\Borland\BDS\3.0\Bin\

Have you seen it…? According to the information about Update 3 located at top About dialog box, it has 9.0.1935.22056 version number. So, any versions less than it, definitely is Update 2 version or below and any versions greater than it, definitely is unofficial patch.

Delphi / C++ Roadmap

EKON9 conference, Germany, David Intersimone presented DeXter, the next upcoming version of Delphi and the Delphi / C++ Builder roadmap during 2005-2008. I have also updated my Delphi codenames article. Borland promised that DeXter will focus on performance and quality, things that missed on DiamondBack (Delphi2005). Well as we have known, Delphi 2005 quality is out of Delphiers expectation (even Borland expectation) as most of Delphiers are well-tuned developer, which quality and performance are the important things. As you’ve known, there are 3 official updates for DiamondBack and unofficial patches released by Allen Bauer, but on my day-to-day basis, the updates dan patches are not enough, my Diamondback still far from stable and reliable.

Courtessy of David Intersimone

Back to Borland roadmap as you can see on the picture above, DeXter, which will be out at end of year, will integrate Delphi, C# and C++ in same IDE, ECO-III, 64bit support for .NET and a full-blown version of Together for Delphi.

The next version, codenamed Highlander, will support net 2.0 and provide a VCL for .NET 2.0, VCL for Compact Framework, support for 64bit .NET 2.0.

Next, Delphi for Vista (2007) will include a VCL for Avalon and Indigo support.

And last, Delphi/C++ for win64, well I think you can figure out what it is.

But I disappointed about Borland support for 64bit native compiler, why it takes so long time, about next 2-3 years as the hardwares and OSes are ready now. There are Opteron, AMD64 and Windows XP 64bit out of there which ready to use now.

Afterall, I really happy with borland for their works. Hopefully DeXter will mature and expect our standards.