How is your development environment setup?

A few months ago, I posted a link to a screenshot of my desktop layout in Delphi 2005. At the time it was to provide an answer to a specific question about some functionality in the IDE. Given the post by Nick Bradbury (I'm a registered user of Top Style which is written by Nick) the other day I thought I'd publish a couple of links showing how I've setup the IDE for use and how a couple of my current projects appear in it.

Please note, I have not scaled the images and my development laptop runs at 1920 x 1200 (they are around 400k each).

• JED, QC (desktop image) (website)
• Delphi Configuration Manager (desktop image) (website)

Please forgive the state of the websites attached, I'm a little busy doing other things at the moment but a new site is being worked on!

I've nearly switched all of my current projects over to StarTeam and I am liking it a whole lot better than VSS. The integration into Delphi 2005 is excellent and I can also use it to track my Change Requests.

I don't use many 3rd Party Components, preferring to use what's included in Delphi or write my own. It looks like I will be using the Web Update component from TMSSoftware though.

I have been using InstallAware for my tools and the next releases of both projects mentioned will include installations.

I'm currently trialing FinalBuilder and liking what I see. Now I just need to get a decent tool to create Help Files...

Better get back to work, the DCM beta was due yesterday.

DCM: Configuration not loading as you expected?

If you have just created your new configuration with Delphi Configuration Manager and when you start up from a generated Desktop Shortcut or from Delphi Configuration Manager itself then most likely you have created a configuration with a space in the name.

Unfortunately I don't check for a space in the name before generating the shortcut. There are two ways to address this issue:

1. rename you configuration without a space in it.
2. modify the desktop shortcut properties to read (path might be different depending on install location):

Config Name: DELPHI WIN32

"C:\Program Files\Borland\BDS\3.0\Bin\bds.exe" -r"DELPHI WIN32"
Note: Extra set of quotes around the -r string.

If you do use the second method to work around the problem, note that you will still not be able to launch this configuration from inside Delphi Configuration Manager.

The good news is that this is fixed in the next release of Delphi Configuration Manager, which goes into Beta testing tomorrow.

Updated Bookmark Viewer IDE Add-In

I have updated my Bookmark Viewer Add-In on CodeCentral.

Here is what has been updated:

• When there are no bookmarks in the list, hide the listbox. The IDE docking was causing the 'No bookmarks...' prompt (which was on a panel) to not reset anchors correctly. Now a fake box and the text is drawn on the forms canvas.
• Call repaint in the OnResize event for the form to make sure the form is painted when it is docked and then resized while docked.
• Stop IDE from raising an 'Invalid datetime to encode' exception when viewing a form as text.

Previously mentioned in this blog entry.