Delphi has had Unit Testing support (in the form of DUnit) for many years, but until now there very little in the way of Automatic Mocking. By contrast the .NET and Java worlds have plenty of mocking frameworks to choose from. 

FinalBuilder 7.0.0.1497 adds support for Amazon's EC2 Cloud Services.

NuGet is a open source package management tool for .NET applications. It allows you to very simply install, create and share reusable assemblies. With the latest release, FinalBuilder now contains a set of actions to help you interact with NuGet as part of your automated build process.

Over the next few posts, I'm going to try to talk about some of the lesser known features in FinalBuilder, and show some ideas and techniques that I hope will help you improve your FinalBuilder projects.

FinalBuilder has had an NUnit action for some time now, but for DUnit we have always advocated just compiling the unit test executable as a console app using the TextTestRunner, and using the Execute Program action. This has worked fine, however it doesn't provide the same sort of integration into FinalBuilder Server as the NUnit action provides.

Delphi XE includes Regular Expression support, something that has been requested many times over the years. In this blog post I'll show some basic usage of regular expressions in delphi.

It's been a long time in the making, but FinalBuilder is almost here. FinalBuilder 7 has been in private beta testing for a few weeks, and today we are opening the beta to existing customers.

FinalBuilder's IDE is message driven. When you select an action in an actionlist for example, the actionlist view publishes a message to which other parts of the IDE can subscribe. The publish/subscribe mechanism used in the IDE has gone through a few revisions over the years, in the quest for the perfect publish/subscribe mechanism...

Distributed verison control systems are gaining in usage and popularity, but many organisations still use traditional centralised VCSs like Subversion and Visual Source Safe. Recently I've been using a hybrid setup and getting many of the benefits of a DVCS without needing to move the whole team to a new VCS platform.

Using interfaces and reference counting in Delphi works great in the most part. Its a feature I use a lot, I'm a big fan of using interfaces to tightly control what parts of a class a consumer has access to. But, there is one big achillies heel with reference counting in Delphi, you cannot keep circular references, at least not easily, without causing memory leaks.