25Jan 2015 by richard@baronsoftware.com

Microsoft: Windows 10 will be free for Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 users for 1 year after launch

Software Events
Microsoft has announced that all Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users will be eligible for a free upgrade to Windows 10 for the first year of its launch. Sorry XP and Vista users you most likely will have to purchase a new machine. This is a good move by Microsoft to show that they are willing to admit that the Windows 8 release was a disaster and it is time to move on. As always, Microsoft claims on numbers is very loose but they claim that over 650 million people have upgraded to Windows 7 SP1 and 200 million people updated to Windows 8.1 Update which means that they'll be getting Windows 10 for free. The Windows 10 release will be a big effort to indicate to the world that…
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24Jan 2015 by richard@baronsoftware.com

Embarcadero Acquires Castalia and Usertility from TwoDesk Software

Rad Studio Delphi Development
Embarcadero has announced that it acquire Castalia for Delphi and Usertility from TwoDesk Software. Embarcadero will integrate the productivity features of Castalia into RAD Studio's integrated development environment (IDE) to enhance and optimize the coding experience for both Object Pascal and C++. RAD Studio will also feature Usertility, a powerful and easy to integrate service for monitoring app usage. This acquisition delivers on Embarcadero's commitment to developer productivity by enabling RAD Studio users to get integrated support for these great third-party solutions, which will be sold and supported by Embarcadero. Castalia provides the Rad Studio Delphi developer live syntax checking as well as other assorted IDE software tools. Usertility provides drop-in application usage analytics for software written in Delphi, where and how many active users, does the software crash, version…
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07Jan 2015 by richard@baronsoftware.com

Lazarus Version 1.2.6 for Windows is available!

Software Events
The Pascal compiler Lazarus has released version 1.2.6 for Windows. The suggestion is to install the 32-bit Windows version due to the instability of the 64-bit version. Lazarus comes in 2 other flavors, one for Linux and one for Apple OSX. The concept is that you write and use one source code base with only having to recompile on the operating system you are using at the moment which could be Linux, Apple OS or Windows. You can install Lazarus based on your operating system by going to Sourceforge Installation procedures The Windows and Linux installation are pretty straight forward allowing you to remove the previous version or you can maintain multiple versions. That is up to the developer. The Apple OS needs 3 different files to be installed to…
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07Jan 2015 by richard@baronsoftware.com

Vote for your favorite programming language at Code2014

Software Events
Vote for you favorite programming languages as well as viewing what others are up to for the year 2014, Click Here What does a programming language mean in today's market is vastly different than 10 years ago where in universities you were still learning how to design / develop with a compiler but after you review code2014, you will see that Javascript is a top contender for a language. With that being said, do you think a scripting language is similar to a programming language. The vote is up to you. Remember you can twitter #Code2014 and vote today!
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30Dec 2014 by richard@baronsoftware.com

Visual Basic 6 still strong after all of these years.

Microsoft Development
The death of Microsoft Visual Basic 6 has been tremendously exaggerated as the saying goes.  VB6 is still used as of today by developers that find it easy to use and can develop a quick 32 bit Windows application.  The issues that pertain to VB6 are components that are no longer supported since either the vendors have gone out of business or no longer support VB6. Visual Basic 6.0 (enterprise or professional) was released in 1998 and support was dropped in 2005.  Since then Microsoft has pushed the Visual Basic.NET version that works with various Windows platforms but is extremely different then what the older VB6 Developer was use to. There is a Visual Basic 6 petition available by clicking here. The web site does have issues and doesn't always…
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