It's now confirmed and made public that FireMonkey (let aside its ill-fated name, for now) will be the Delphi cross-platform GUI framework. FireMonkey, aka KsDev VgScene/DXScene is a vector based GUI framework. So it looks after two attempts failed to build a cross platform library first on Qt (CLX) then on .Net (VCL.Net) Embarcadero selected the Java Swing approach and decided to develop its own proprietary GUI framework. It's a dangerous approach, for several reasons.

Some reactions to some posts of mine on Embarcadero Delphi non-tech forums are interesting. It looks many Delphi users on that forum are victims of a kind of "siege syndrome" and don't accept any critique to Embarcadero behaviour. Let's analyze it.

Everything started when Embarcadero announced the Delphi 64 beta, saying that XE customers would have been given precedence. It looked like a silly decision to me. My reasons are:

This post is in Italian because it is about issues with my Italian ADSL provider, it could be interesting to an Italian audience only.

Dopo dieci anni di felice uso della mia linea ASDL Infostrada, improvvisamente, a metà aprile, la velocità passa da una media di 4-5 Mbit (con punte vicino ai 7 massimi, essendo a poche centinatia di metri dalla centrale), ad appena 0,5 Mbit (con rare punte attorno al megabit), non rararamente la velocità in upload è maggiore di quella in download.

Today this site has been unavailable due to a fire in the hosting provider's (Aruba) UPS facility that prompted a safety shutdown of servers. I apologize for the inconvenience.

On April 10th, 2011, Sandon Utensileria, the company established by my grandfather, Francesco Sandon, and his brother Luigi (later joined by the other two brothers, Felice and Fausto), celebrates its 75th anniversary of uninterrupted activity, even when WWII swept across Milano the warehouse was moved in a hayloft outside the city, and orders were dispatched via sidecars to the workshops that were still operative.

The first site, via MacMahon 22, in the very early years (Copyright © Sandon Utensileria, all rights reserved)

A friend of mine pointed me to this post by Nick Hodges. I wonder if it is a hint about what happened at Embarcadero with Delphi XE. It should have been the Windows, Mac and Linux cross compiler, with a new CLX (the 1000 widgets?), which instead just before release turned out to be just an interim release with some third party products integrated, a primitive SVN integration, and some enhancements here and there.

Although slowly, Microsoft is admitting junk filters in Windows Live Mail 2011 are broken, here a possible workaround (it worked for me). Hope MS won't delete it as it did with a thread complaining about the issue...

Last weekend our company set up a day at Rivolto airport, to attend the airshow for the 50th anniversary of PAN - Frecce Tricolory. Thanks to our parent company Finmeccanica we were able to obtain passes to park at the airport and be guest at the Finmeccanica chalet, just to the left of the authorities area in the middle of the airport.

We arrived early and we were able to take seats in the front row, along the taxyway parallel to the runaway, where the acrobatic teams planes were parked, under a perfect blue sky and shining sun, with just a hint of wind.

To celebrate the PAN 50th "birthday" AMI (Aereonautica Militare Italiana - Italian Air Force) organized the 10th acrobatic team pilots meeting. The military acrobatic teams from Poland, Croatia, Spain, Jordan, Switzerland, France, UK, and of course Italy were present.