The call is out for Unicode migration stories. If you have encountered a Unicode-related challenge migrating your existing applications to Delphi 2009 or later, other Delphi developers have the opportunity to learn from your success.

Author and Delphi developer Cary Jensen is looking for real-world stories about Unicode migration for inclusion in a white paper on migrating Delphi applications to Unicode. With your input, this white paper should serve as a valuable resource for the entire Delphi community.

What Cary needs are brief descriptions of the challenge or challenges that you encountered, along with your solutions. He will mention your name in the white paper if he includes your story (unless you want to remain anonymous).

Cary is a great guy, and he does so much for all of us, so why don’t you send him a nice birthday present of a Unicode migration story.  You don’t need to gift wrap it, or even put candles on it.  If you are feeling festive when you are done, then you can eat a slice of cake (or whatever you do to celebrate) in his honor.

While today, November 5th is his Birthday, he is accepting gifts through November 27th, but the sooner the better!

John kicked off the poll process by nominating Zarko Gajic of Delphi.About.Com and Peter Below of TeamB. Then the community nominated a number of others, including myself. Just being nominated among such other great Delphi legends is quite an honor.

In the end around 500 developers voted and I received 11% of the votes, ending up with 4th place, making me a Nominee. The other winners are:

• Daniel R. Wolf of Delphi PRAXiS with the Gold award,
• Zarko Gajic with the Silver award
• Peter Below with the Bronze award.

Other nominees include

• Primoz Gabrijelcic
• Gary Darby
• Alister Christie
• Andreas Hausladen
• Neil Moffat

Also Primoz Gabrijelcic won the nobility prize for encouraging other to vote for Peter Below.

Be sure to check out the interviews with a number of the winners, including me.

Hadi Hariri is Technical Lead at iMeta Technologies, an ISV specialized in developing complete IT solutions. His passions include software architecture and web development. Book author and frequent contributor to developer publications, Hadi speaks at both national and international conferences and user groups. He is based in Spain where he lives with his wife and two sons and runs the Malaga .NET User Group.  You can catch him on his blog or on Twitter.

We caught up with Hadi at the start of day 2 of SDC 2009.

This is the first actual release.  Previously you had to download it from SVN.  It still appears to be a little lite on the documentation though, but it is exciting to see this project progressing forward.

I encourage you all to get out and vote in the poll.  It closes this Saturday the 24th of October.

• Info on Entity Framework
• Info on Functional Programming
• Info on Monad in Functional Programming
• Craig’s CodeRage 3 on Functional Programming in Delphi 2009: Video and Code.
• Craig’s CodeRage 4 on Entity Framework.

Some of the other topics we talked about:

• Dynamic typing
• Dynamic method invocation
• Attributes
• The future of programming languages
• Network aware development
• Static Code Analysis
• Unit Testing
• REST

Also check out

• XKCD’s Book Volume 0
• BBook of Geek from BBSpot.com

Thanks Craig!

• Planning - Since the interviews are in different timezones I use The World Clock Meeting Planner to find a time that works for everyone.  It makes the process really easy.  Once I have a time that works, I put it on my Google Calendar.
• Skype - Possibly the most popular application written in Delphi, Skype Voice over IP what I use to connect with everyone for the interviews.
• Pamela – A good full featured Skype recording tool.  Records audio and video both.  An important feature it has is recording to wave files in stereo, with me on the left, and everyone else on the right.  It is $30.
• Callgraph – Is a free call recording tool that also supports stereo and recording to wave files.  I used Callgraph for most of my podcasts until recently.  It has a slight echo at least with my sound system, even with the echo cancellation turned on.  This might not be an issue on other systems, or even be a big deal to most people.
• Logitech ClearChat Comfort USB headset - This is the headset I used for microphone and headphones through episode 32.  It does a really good job, for a really reasonable price, and because the microphone is held by your mouth the background noise is very low, plus it includes pretty good headphones.  If you are just starting out then this is a great option, and if you need both headphones and a microphone then you can kill two birds with one stone.  There are 3 levels of microphone connectors: Analog, USB and XLR.  The analog microphones use the 1/4 jack to connect to your computer.  It delivers an analog signal to your sound card where it is converted to digital .  The problem with this is inside your computer is noisy, and that noise gets into your recordings.  USB and XLR both are converted to digital signals outside the computer, so they have much less noise.  XLR is the professional microphone format, which requires external hardware to do the conversion.  So USB is the poor-man’s digital solution, but still good in my opinion.
• Blue Snowflake Microphone – Entry level professional quality portable USB Microphone.  I’ve heard it recommended as a good entry level podcast microphone by other podcasters too.   Amazon has the Snowflake on sale at a really good price right now because they have a new one with a built in camera that just came out.  The Snowflake is a better then average USB microphone, but still at a good price.
• Audacity editor – Is a free, open source, cross platform program for editing and recording sound.  It is a really effective tool for editing audio, and your can’t beat the price.  I actually tried a number of commercial and professional level tools, and I found Audacity easier to use, and just as effective.  Maybe someday I might upgrade to a different tool, but this one really does the job, and I can’t beat the price.
• Levelator – A specialized tool for normalizing, compressing and limiting the audio.  Just drag and drop the wave files on it after removing the noise in Audacity and it does the rest.  Be sure to use Levelator before you include music or sound effects.  It is only designed for working with voice.  One odd thing I discovered with it is some times if you have slight noises like swallowing or breathing, sometimes it will boost it up much louder.  I am hoping that my new microphone does better with this . . .  Let me know how it sounds.
• CyberEars hosting – Podcast hosting has been provided by CyberEars.com.  They are big Delphi fans there.  Thanks guys!

Tune in next time for a video of the entire production process.

Note from Jeroen Pluimers: Actually, only Digital XLR is done outside the computer.  Normal XLR does not, but usually does not suffer from noise:

1. Because most computers don’t have built-in XLR
2. It is shielded much much better
3. Signal strength usually is higher

Audacity can also level your sounds

Update: Levelator automatically does a much better job then I have been able to achieve with Audacity.  Maybe if I knew exactly what I was doing I could get better results with Audacity, but Levelator does really good, and I don’t have to worry about doing it right.

This is the first podcast recorded with my new Blue Snowflake microphone.  Let me know if you like the audio better.

The picture of Andreas is actually a few years old.  He didn’t have a current one.

Something new I want to do is start taking listener questions.  Some of these questions might be for a specific upcoming interview, while others might be for nobody specific, and I will do my best to find someone to answer it for you.  Sounds exciting, right?

There are a few ways to submit a question

1. Call the Delphi Hotline at (361) 4Delphi and leave a message
2. Send an email to questions this domain (feel free to send an audio file or just text)
3. Leave a comment in the blog posts where I announce the next episode
4. Post to our Uservoice page (or vote for someone else’s question)
5. Figure out a different way to get me your question (be creative)

I am not making any guarantees that I can answer your questions, but I will do my best.

I look forward to your questions!

Stay tuned to CodeRage 4 the rest of the week.  I have two more sessions coming, and there is a lot of other great sessions there too.