My first step with Delphi XE5 and more ...

A new year has just rolled out. I'm sure your new years resolutions have been set. One of my resolutions is to activate my blog about Delphi & Reporting beside many other things @office or @home ...

I moved in the last years from developing more and more to the IT-management and at the moment my position is CIO of an authority. But sometimes I miss developing in Delphi with Pascal (which I use more then 30 years in the meantime).

Well, the longest travel starts with a first step and I've installed Embarcadero Delphi XE5, Nevrona Rave 11.0.5 BEX (with 32- and 64-bit support and RaveScripting) and FastReport 4.15. For the important eDocument-possibilities I have installed the incredible powerful components from Gnostice (Thanks to Mani from gnostics for all the help of the gtRaveExp-components for 32- and 64-bit).

I've a good feeling about version XE5 after some hours of installation, looking around the new features (not mobileDevices or OS-X parts) and stability.
Especially FireDAC is a great decision from EMBT, have I mentioned that I use AnyDAC since 2008/09 on many of my C/S-applications. Meaning not new but more features included, things to learn for me.

The first short tests of some (db-)applications on this new IDE show on the screen a "Cursor" (Cursor mean in this context Current set of records and not the Cursor from the command-line, btw), a good sign.

Congrats to Marco and the whole team in Scotts Valley and the EMBT-offices around the world.

Now the system (Win7-64, XE5, Rave11, FastReport4, Gnostice eDocEngine and their new XtremeDocument Studio ) is ready for a start into a reporting-journey (again)....

In the next monthes I'll write here some articles about Delphi & reporting.
First I'll publish the Rave AddOn's for Rave 11 BEX and this reportengine in the new (?) unicode and 64-bit environment.
Then is on my blog-roadmap the component from Gnostice about digital document processing, PDF-area and the combination with report engines based on VCL.
After this I plan to look into FM and reporting with FastReport; I think an interesting adventure for a VCL-junkie since 1995, or ??


stay tuned and don't forget:   things.take.time.

The Power of Rave

the headline remembers me on Huey Lewis and the news hit "the power of love" a long time ago .... but back to Rave.
I'm sometimes read and answer Rave-questions in the nevrona-newsgroups and yesterday I found an interesting thread from a Rave-User:

nevrona.public.rave.reports.general
Re: Order is important!!

".... Lastly, I've used both Crystal and Rave, and I gotta say, I wish more people
could see just how awesome a product Rave is. And how much more power you
have with Rave.

--
Christian Wilkerson"

thanks Christian for this!

I'm a TeamNevrona-member and when we say "Rave have power and is a phantastic product for reporting" is this not the same like other developers who works with Rave because the people think we must only talk positive about a product...
I work with Rave round about 10 years and I've realized all my reporting-issues with Rave.. and on my consulting-work on many companies (from small to really big companies) in europe (with Delphi, Rave and databases like Oracle) I can't remember any report-issue that the reporting - engine from Nevrona don't create with success.
Yeah, I haven't wrote "Rave" because Nevrona have two report engines, one is visual: Rave and the other one is code-based: Report Printer Pro, available since April 1995, two month later then the first Delphi Release!
And if the report design is too complex for a visual report then you can do it all in Pascal-code inside your Delphi-Application. You'll find a good demo in the Rave-folder.
On the nevrona.com/rave-page are good information about this report-solution and on CodeGear-Network page is another good introduction from Leonel about code-based reporting...