During the webinar on Nov 15, 2022 I, Neil Laskowski owner SwiftExpat.com, will be presenting. I will
take this opportunity to provide a quick profile about who I am, what tools I use and the inspiration
behind some of my products.
When did you start with Delphi?
Berlin, 10.1, was my introduction to Delphi when a client asked if I could upgrade an application. I
downloaded the trial, reviewed some of the demos and let the client know I would take on the
challenge. Delphi 11.2 is my daily IDE currently.
What tools did you use before Delphi?
Visual Studio for C#, Eclipse for Java, Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle Apex, Toad for PLSQL, SAP Business
Objects, and of course VB6.
What was the inspiration for Marshal?
Defect resolution and proper root cause analysis. Marshal is designed to enable you inspect components
and gather as much information as possible for analysis. As a developer you should be able to confirm,
document and fix defects in the same cycle.
Marshal also provides a sanity check as you are coding, the ETL issue in the webinar actually happened
while I was coding the demo. Inspection allows me to look at the current state and determine that
indeed the adapter was configured correctly but the query was loaded in the wrong order.
What was the inspiration for Caddie?
Complete the development cycle. Organization is required to ensure discoveries made at runtime make
it back to the development process. Artifacts must be created to document the defect and changes to
the code must be checked-in to ensure that fix makes it to the next build.
Caddie fulfills the task of downloading and installing new versions of Marshal to the various versions of
the Delphi on your machine.
What was the inspiration for Deputy?
Customizing the IDE experience. Reducing distraction is key to staying on task and orphaned processes
could be resolved with an IDE expert. Experts take a lot of time to code and debug; the reward is
feedback I receive letting me know the expert is saving other developers time.
Why did you start using FNC?
I was working on a FMX project that required a chart and grid and FNC provided the best features and
functionality for the price. The fact that FNC Grid support export to CSV and XLS made it a clear choice.
FNC Chart had all the functionality I required so I was not paying for extra features.
How often do you use FNC components?
Daily. FNC tree is the only tree I use for new development, which is great simply due to the fact that it
works across VCL and FMX. You invest a lot of time learning components and how to customize
behaviors; with FNC what you learn transfers across VCL and FMX.