The good one is David Intersimone is gone. The bad one is Nick Hodges is back.

From the "Delphi 10 Seattle" documentation:

To specify a subnet of IP addresses, specify an IP address with a 0 as its fourth number. For example, if you specify "192.168.4.0" as the Target, your manager searches the 192.168.4.x subnet for remote managers. Note: You can not specify wider subnets. For example, "192.168.0.0" is not supported.

Today The Register pointed out a Microsoft's document about "Configure telemetry and other settings in your organization". It has a scary passage. When in "Full telemetry level" - the default level in the Home and Pro versions, it allows Microsoft:

Embarcadero (recently acquired by Idera) announced AppMethod, its cross-platform only development tools, available only under a subscription model (Individuals $299 per year, per developer, per platform. Enterprise $999 per year, per developer) and launched less than two years ago, will be no longer be available, and "will be merged into RAD Studio 10".

BusinessWire posted this news about the no-longer-so-secret sale of Embarcadero to Idera.

On September 24th, Moody's acted on Idera rating, citing "The rating action follows the announcement of the company's pending acquisition of Embarcadero Technologies, Inc. ("Embarcadero")" and "integration challenges associated with the Embarcadero acquisition which will more than double the company's size" (see https://www.moodys.com/research/Moodys-assigns-B3-CFR-to-Idera-Inc-outlook-stable--PR_335231).

A colleague of mine was using the "modernized" service implementation I wrote about some time ago. His services needs to be notified when a user logs on/off or locks/unlocks the machine. Everything was fine for a while, until he started to complain it worked for a while, but then, "randomly", notifications weren't triggered any longer.

Resident Embarcadero wizard of Oz, David Intersimone, has been so bold to write about Delphi "security". You know I already wrote about the utterly lack of security in Datasnap (but relying on web server security using https), but there are some true pearls in that article.

Despite what promised, Embarcadero wasn't able to meet the February 1st, 2015 deadline for 64 bit iOS apps. Not a surprise. Just another warning Embarcadero is trying to do too much with too little, and aligning someone else deadlines and releases with your own is difficult and usually not worth the effort.

No, the title of this blog post is not a mistake. Delphi, including XE7, only implements services using NT APIs obsoleted since Windows 2000. Windows NT was EOLed in 2004, 2000 in 2010, and XP last year, yet Delphi still doesn't take advantage of the new APIs. What are the advantages? Well, using the "extended" RegisterServiceCtrlHandlerEx() and its HandlerEx() callback, services can receive more and useful notifications (control codes). The new control codes allow to be notified of and handle: