Flying in the Microsoft Azure Cloud - TCoffeeAndCode

hello greetings programs programmers and everyone else that's on the stream welcome to tea coffee and code um for wednesday the 8th of september 2021 flying in the microsoft azure cloud there is no cloud it's just somebody else's computer uh this is uh oh that's right i gotta do a little warranty disclaimer this is our opinions subject to change yeah so upcoming upcoming tea coffee and code sessions next week we have uh exploring the amazon cloud aws and then we do have more content coming after that um but we're changing things up a little bit we're not going to be using go to webinar anymore it's going to be uh youtube stream that's my plan i'm still working with some of the kinks out on that so uh yeah we'll uh so do stay tuned to uh blogs.marketer.com oh yes the host today we have ian who's somewhere i guess relative to me up or down probably right now because i'm showing slides i think i'm that way actually if people have got the webcams on i'm pointing no no wait that way that's it to your right left i so actually my hope is that when i switch to the i'm gonna be using obs with the uh um youtube stream directly and so i could actually just swap in the video view right here instead of a picture and so that would be you moving i should loom over people like some kind of what what's the uh 1984 that's the one yeah you'll have to run up with a hammer and smash the video okay so ian is mvp um poet author narrator developer born in london lives in dallas texas which apparently is currently raining and delphi is his superpower indeed it is yes hello everybody again we're back for another tea coffee and code yeah and then we have holder flick who is currently a disembodied voice hey guys i'm here i just don't have a camera today so um i'll just be the voice in the background you know that's yeah all right hooker is uh real quick good thank you jim um i'm an embarcadero mvp i'm also the coordinator for the us region and uh an evangelist for tms software recently i used the pandemic you know we all can't go out so what do you do you drive you write a couple of delphi books you know so i wrote one about tms web core and uh three more that are really hands-on examples and some of the examples are also um about cloud technology so that's why i'm here fantastic and wagner land graph is here i think i'm not sure if he's sorry about that wagner actually actually i used the wrong link i try to open the link for as an attendee and i end up here as a panelist what happened oh congratulations you've been promoted [Laughter] yeah i was supposed to be here next week uh all right wagner is the tms business product manager for works on aurelius an xdata remote db and also provides training courses and other uh training around delphi and his blogs at landgraph.dev he's an embarcadero mvp and been using delphi since delphi one thanks for joining us wagner there we go we've paused that background i've heard that it's a little intense on the uh stream i forgot about that yeah all the bandwidth for the background yeah and then of course myself chief developer advocate and engineer from barcadero long time software developer uh yeah chris love love doing this love hanging out with these amazing mvps and uh talking with all of all you so grab your beverage i've got my industrial size mug of water actually was gonna get a a drink this morning and didn't get one so like a actual real drink but i have to say jim as well whilst we were getting ready i i was uh renew my code signing certificate and uh i i know them fairly well i've been using them for a few years case software and the guy has just told me he's a delphi fan really yeah he said he uh originally wrote the he has a tool that does the the certificate management it's slightly off topic about what we're talking today but no actually this is really useful yeah go ahead search certificates it's so such an important topic yeah well he i sign all my code and in fact all of you should do if you're not um i i have no connection with k software it's k-software.net um other than the fact i buy my certificates from them and uh and they do a good job but um the guy that uh runs it he said he originally started um selling code signing certificates because couldn't get them anywhere else and i have to say i've not found anybody cheaper and i have a little bit of a problem with the one this year because of uh the kind of business relationships i have with people and their support is amazing this is not an advert for them i don't get any kickback for them it's a genuine i think they're okay but he did say uh he used to be uh well he still is a pascal slash delphi fanboy and he's sitting here playing with 10.42 and they're using the uh cross-platform uh uh stuff he said it was very interesting so there you go a new fan he's got a nice tool that they write i think he actually wrote it in c plus plus to be fair but it's um you put you load your certificate in and then you can drop your executables on and hit a button and it it signs all the uh the apps for you um like you know very simple you can do it by the command line which is how i do it with a build box and things like that but um that tool is very useful if you only have a few assets or you've got a nice sort of collection of executables or something like that you want to sign but very cheap yeah very very useful people oh there you go which i'm going to share in the chat window here as well on code signing because that's an important thing um yeah and this actually i'll paste the um one from the blog as well because um hang on if i get that link i mean that's that's usually not what a what a speaker or an organizer of this talk should do but could we just quickly wrap up what the implications for code signing are and what the requirements are because i get this asked quite frequently why should i do it in the first place of course we know what it it tells you where the software comes from but are there hard requirements right now already for service systems for example as that you can't run anything that is unsigned in certain situations anymore is that already the case and maybe we wrap that up real quick uh well i i can ask that question that's why i'm asking it yeah the de facto uh code signing guy um there's a couple of things we deliver uh when i say we the company i primarily work for in the uk we deliver our applications over the internet we have an activation server which is written in delphi in fact everything um of that product is written delphi um from the activation server that manages the activations through the little downloadable stub where the customer places an order and it says here we go here's the little stub that does the installation all of that is written in delphin all of it's code signed the stub that downloads if you do not sign your code when you go to download an executable from the internet it will get it blocked by microsoft smart screen by default now if you code sign your code that will not happen and it it depends on the type of certificate you've got this too there's one called ev and one called ov the ov signing uh certificates are for organizational validation they're not quite as bad to get but you do need to prove that your organization is a genuine company or a genuine individual you need to provide evidence of who you are for example your driving licence if you're an american an id um or um some letterheads and things like that because they really do take it seriously the certificate is validated they will then call your company with an automated system and you have to type in a code that they get so there's a kind of validation with extended validation they do even more than that they check all sorts of records to make sure that you really are who you say you are and you have a little hardware key that you need to put in your computer that then signs your applications or drivers anything any asset that's dr uh assignable a pdf for example um with that hardware key has got you know one of these constantly changing encryption things so um if you don't code sign you've all done it if you've run an application you'll see coming up in this uh this uh blog actually um your application will come up and say it's from an unknown publisher and that your your application is blocked and it could harm your device not all users are sophisticated enough to actually understand which bits to click to make it run anyway and some people if they're corporates will not allow you to run unsigned code my wife's company will not they just say no if it's not code signed you can't run it don't care how good it is actually i feel i feel very uncomfortable in running an installer that is not called signing yeah unless i'm really really sure that it's from a source that i know even then i i i'm afraid because it might be tempered or something like that but i like to ask you are you using ev certificates or i'm using i'm using ov because we have we had lots of problems with our certificates at tms software it's a because microsoft uh wait a minute uh microsoft has uh has made it stricter for for the certificates recently i don't remember the technical details but i believe it the the certificate should be more uh if you or something like that for drivers that's for sure but they they were enforced in a higher level of certificates and uh and it's a nightmare here at least for the certificates we got we had to do we had to use usb tokens yeah the certificates and it's a nightmare because it doesn't work with the vm you know i i had to build a next data server in my physical machine to sign the certificates via attp because i couldn't make the usb tokens to work in the virtual machines it's a it's unbelievable how they make it difficult for for deployment for automatic deployment for example well the trouble is that they currently don't have a widely available alternative technology for ev and i i totally agree um the ev hardware token is painful because um one of our regular guys that i see on twitter a guy called stuart um clearly i think his surname is sorry stuart i can't remember your name off the top um i know he has to sign his um code because he does some i think it's health care stuff and again i'm probably really maligning what he does but um he has to use the eevee and he has a lot of assets to sign he has found that he can make it sign uh ask for the password for the token once and then it will work for everything but even so he says it makes automated continuous integration builds very difficult and uh let me just shut my door for a second for some reason i have a lot of birds and they're suddenly freaking out in the background yeah so it's a problem um i use uh ov and what happens with ov is that the first few times your application is downloaded it will still get blocked by smart screen and smart screen is the thing that comes up when you download from your browser an executable or msi or anything like that an installer and once an undefined number of times it's been downloaded it will stop doing that and it will just accept that it's safe you have to keep downloading and saying yes this is a genuine executable luckily we have safety in numbers that we have enough customers that uh it's very quick for us it's like a couple of days but once that's happened with that executable and it's signed with a certificate they can trace it won't happen again it once it's it's um considered safe then it's considered safe all the time as long as it's signed so that that's what has been our experience we've renewed the certificate plenty of times um but with ov yes it's a real pain there is no way around it at the moment unfortunately they do know it's a problem and actually um even the process of getting a code signing certificate involves internet explorer uh which is absolutely insane chris chris peters asked a great question can the ev certificate be installed on the tpm model in the systems and and yes actually adrian from from our team of excel was able to install the certificate in the tpm model so in in this case the usb was not needed so it's it's working but i don't know what happens if you update your machine or something like that but uh you need to re-import something yeah i mean the the problem the problem is that um there's a monopoly on who generates those certificates you know the certificate signing authorities um sextigo is like the number one um people that used to be komodo but um they changed to be calling themselves sexy go for some reason um and it is almost a monopoly but um they will do things like if your certificate needs to be renewed because of a change then you don't have to go through the whole validation process again as long as the majority of your chain is still um approved you know approved then they can regenerate the certificate for you and they will do that um but so if your tpm yeah module has to be changed then they'll they'll redo it for you um i don't know if that's free but i've never had to do it but uh i'm told i'm told that it is part of the service that you know they they recognize that you're buying something that should just work now people get confused between code signing certificates and um web ssl certificates and they're not the same um they're similar but they're not the same similar idea but yeah i mean they're exactly the same principle it's just that you can't use one to work for the other and you can't use the codesign certificate to secure your web page and with let's encrypt nowadays there's absolutely no reason why your website shouldn't have a certificate if you're if you've got an app that's written in say webcore dms web call given that we've got two tms guys on we might as well name drop a great product or um or intra web um which is also does the latest version of intro also supports ssl and uh or indeed anything you know like your own um web applications um if you use let's encrypt let's encrypt have a bot alex encrypt bot that works on windows linux and all the rest of it if you use um ingenix i'll let jim google that one and put that up on the screen as well but nginx it's got a very simple mechanism for doing reverse proxies in fact i think holger you and i spoke about this previously didn't we do something with this in the past i think but um yeah it's very cool and it's very easy for a delphi application to then be serving up http to that web proxy via nginx that's actually wrong nginx.org jim dot org.com yeah actually i have to give proper credit before because um wagner is the one that pointed out if i develop my x data web services and i want to be doing it the easy way i should just develop the http version and then use a reverse proxy to have https because it is easy to um hook up x data to an ssl certificate with windows because there is a user interface for us as delphi developers but as soon as you go into the linux world um i'm not so sure of what i'm doing with all those configuration files well with ingenix actually it's not it's not very difficult the only thing you've got to do is use vim or vi to edit the file although of course if you had uh ultra edit you know now that it's part of the uh the idea of family if you had android edit you could edit it on with ultra edit as well but the config file is basically the same whether it's linux or windows um the only difference is the paths have got slashes in the opposite way but um i i absolutely if anybody was to ask me as a consultant what i would recommend i would say using gen x for your reverse proxy it's dead easy it's like five lines i can post it in a blog post or something like that maybe i should do that um you just put these lines in and any application that you've got this http can then be outward facing onto the internet with https with the lexingtrip certificate the let's encrypt certificate bot will run as a windows um scheduled task or a crontab um task in linux or on the mac uh contact task as well and it will update regularly so the let's encrypt certificates for those that don't know it are completely free ssl certificates they are definitely recognized by anybody um anybody that says oh you know it's it's not the real thing rubbish it's a completely real and genuine very widely accepted ssl certificate there's a lot of fun you know from people selling ssl certificates who want you to you know buy their very expensive alternative of you know 100 250 of a web ssl sticker details in and within a few seconds literally that quick you will get your ssl certificate back completely for free you can then use nginx put all your delphi apps or whatever to point towards ingenix and and that's it after that your https stuff works and that will work for as um wagner and um holger say that'll work for x data or indeed any of your um systems out there that need to use https and it's completely free solution why pay for this when you can do it for free and also why doesn't your website use ssl why do you not have that little padlock if you can get the certificate for free if your host if your web host won't make you do it with respect you should look for a different web host because there's plenty out there the web host i've been at for years is like no they're not compatible with our server but we'll sell you one for a whole lot of money so i'm in the process of changing it just i haven't done it yet but it takes a while yeah but yeah i had that problem too i i don't want to name drops and um companies because you know i'm very much i believe that the advice i give should be completely independent of people bribing me if you see what i mean or coercing me or giving me a favor to say things because i want my what i say to be genuine from what are my experiences oh that's why i'm an mvp i believe that just re-share my knowledge so my advice is that i use dream host for example as one of the people they definitely do free ssl certificates they're not the only ones there's plenty of others out there some of the bigger hosts well-known hosts whose names i don't want to be um horrible um they they charge quite a lot of money and i i just think it's in this day and age it's pretty outrageous let's encrypt to ruin their business model sorry but they have you know and by the way let's encrypt a backed by a lot of people google and microsoft and a few others so yeah though there is if i understand correctly there the there just like there's the ev and ov certificates for s for uh code signing there is uh effectively tiers for ssl certificates but generally speaking they're not something that uh most people worry about you know it an ssl certificate is an ssl certificate there's not as much of a difference you're going into like you do with the ev versus ov on code signing so you know like if you're a bank you might want to go with something beyond the let's encrypted certificate but uh generally speaking for 99 of the web traffic let's encrypt is a perfectly valid yeah i mean if you are the bbc or um abc news or something like that then you've got a very complicated infrastructure that probably has you know content delivery networks and things like that this is not what let's encrypt is designed for you know if you are as you say a bank it's probably very similar you've got all sorts of you know very complicated hardware firewalls and traffic shaping and you know uh attack mitigation and all the rest of it in which case again let's decrypt is not for you but the majority of people we have got on the questions at the moment um are probably not of that ilk and let's encrypt is going to be absolutely fine i can tell you i i personally manage or partially manage at least 60 websites but probably a lot more uh in fact so many i i couldn't even tell you what the number is but it's a lot and um some of those get hits of you know orders of magnitude more than most people would get and um and we have let's encrypt certificates on them and they have got e-commerce carts on them which are then you know trust pilot you heard of trust pilot that check whether your shopping cart is validated and secure and lost a bit they do penetration testing of that it passes all those checks so you know yes there are there are circumstances under which let's encrypt is not the right thing but actually majority of the time it's uh i mean we did say one time we would probably do a webinar on let's uh on code signing and certificates but we seem to have gone down that little rubber hole already by accident actually there's a couple people asking the the if this ties to cloud uh amazon cloud so it does in a couple ways right because there are uh if you are doing cloud services you need to have certificates right if you have if you have your own domain you need to have a certificate on there and then also i believe that some of the things if you're uploading some things to the cloud they need to be signed too is that correct if to be run on cloud servers anywhere you want to run it it's got to be code signed and in fact um i think on uh windows 365 which is office which is microsoft's azure virtual desktops i think you can't run it unless it is signed i i i could be wrong and someone might come back and correct me but my wife's company uses um azure virtual desktop i'm pretty certain you have to code sign everything so i don't know about azure directly but it wouldn't surprise me you know there are some very big um uh providers of software shall we say who don't code sign for their own reasons one of those is heidi sql which is a great great product i really like heidi sql i guarantee you you can trust it and uh and it's written in delphi and uh we've talked about it before and i think i've done a blog post on it in fact uh yeah i have definitely done a blog post on it i mean if you click on my jim doesn't need this but if you click on my name on that article you'll see a blog post about it when you try and download that uh that actually comes up and says that it's not trusted um which is ironic because hiding sql is probably used by more people on the planet than any other piece of software to connect to mysql and things like that and uh again this is microsoft slightly um paranoid wording should we say of that executable because that executable has been downloaded enough that really signed or unsigned they should be able to say now it is safe you know if it's not been flagged by some antivirus or something like that by now then it probably is okay because it's been around long enough um but there are plenty of others like that that you download the package and it comes up with this yellow box saying well this isn't signed and it's probably unsafe and it's not true but um the way well it's it's one of those things that you it you can't know and the reason that a lot of open source projects don't sign unfortunately is that the uh if it's a open source project they can't check the keys into the source control right and then they can't so only one if one person so if somebody has if it's a open source they have to pay for it so that's a out-of-pocket expense right and a lot of these get sponsored and stuff like that but still it's kind of a big deal to consider but then the they can't check it in so that means one person on the team has to be in charge of that of managing that and doing the signing and you know it's just it's a it's a complication that comes into open source that doesn't fit open source model without some sort of additional uh help yeah yeah so there are open source projects that do cosign but frequently they don't unfortunately yeah g experts is a classic example of a well-used executable where i know um thomas i think his name is um holger correct me if i'm wrong but um he he also has problems he has said before that he you know it's too much of a task for him because he feels like he although gx is very popular it's not his full-time thing you know it's nice not what he does day in day out and so um the effort involved in um trying to maintain the code certificate and what he sees as the expense which i believe there are open source um systems that will pro provide code signing certificates for free um for open source projects but um uh you know i i totally get that not everybody's in a position to code sign but um if you are selling your application and you're you're a vendor of software then you absolutely should code sign and the minimum should be the ov which is the simplest way of doing it it doesn't need a dongle um really if you're someone like tms which is a big organization with a lot of complicated installs and requirements for the signing of drivers and all sorts of things like that um then ev is the thing you should go for um i've never found it necessary for my own software and we have 10 000 plus people using the software so um you know it's not about necessarily the number of people your software gets out to it's about your exact set of circumstances and the security and validation that you need for it so and the question that is here on in the chat is like do you really have to resign each time you make a change yes you have to as soon as you make a change to the executable um i think there's even a hash in the signature yeah so you can let's the sense that you can detect modifications so if if somebody would modify your executable your signature would no longer be valid and that's the whole idea behind code signing and i think this is hopefully nobody understands this wrong of course you can only do this if you're like like me a single developer that you include the code signing in your release process if you compile obviously if you if you have a big company that you work with ian you would obviously not sign this yourself as a developer you would have a separate code signing at some point before release let me put it this way my perspective okay with the code signing certificates you don't have to use a manual tool like the um k software's a little tool you can use ms sign which is a application that comes with the windows sdk developer kit or something like that i forget exactly correct yeah and what you can do is you can add a built a post build event into delphi and at the end of the build event when it's a successful build is completed you can have a command line in there which is ms sign slash and then some details of the certificate and the password and it will sign your executable now that is if you're creating individual executables yourself or as part of a team so this team there's a guy whose job girl whose job it is to create a web server.exe or something like that that gets code signed but you can also do that in a build box so if you are as i do i have a build process that's a bunch of scripts effectively and what they do is they go through they get all the executables and pull them down either pre-built if they're just individual projects or built on the spot by the build box that's the purpose of the buildbox after all uh a known kind of um vector for your applications and uh during that process it uses dcc um the delphi command line compiler compiles executable if that's successful and it tests for success obviously it will then code sign it there and then it also virus scans it before it co-signs it and virus scans it before it goes to be built into a downloadable image and we use different virus scanners to do that as well more on that in a minute um but the the point about the certificate is that it says when this executable was packaged finally as a exe file in the files finalized there is in there a cryptographic checksum and a hash that cannot be reproduced because it uses the cosine certificate to do that encryption if a virus or someone with a hex editor changes a couple of bytes on it that's that certificate is broken and microsoft will tell you it's broken if you take a signed app and try and edit it you'll immediately get a message from microsoft saying that the certificate is invalid and it will tell you that it's invalid for the execute one in fact i think it tells you that the the the uh the uh certificate is invalid for that particular artifact if your code signing certificate expires um it doesn't affect your applications that are out there because it's the validity of the certificate at the time at which you created it and that's really what it's about is saying that when i write uh notepad.exe when i have a you know delphi program that creates notepad.exe that file gets signed by me or someone i've authorized to sign on my behalf to build box or wagner or holger or gym or something like that i've authorized them to sign this code on my behalf because i trust them and they have got the certificate and embedded in their machine it gets into the key store on mac and things like that and it depends how you do it and uh and uh and then they sign it after it goes off then it can get virus and it can get hacked and someone can piggyback code onto it but it'll break the certificate but at least the point at which i signed it that certificate was valid it gets checked with septigo through the certificate authority at the point of which it's signed once it gets used in 10 years time they can open that happen and still run because the certificate is fine as long as the cryptographic checksum and that certificate um match that application will still run now i can't write a code sign once this is expired but at least that application works so um we probably had to move on uh i know this is important it is related you do need to be aware of code signing and be signing you know having ssl certificates inciting your code with uh working with the cloud but i think we should probably move on now i do appreciate it and hopefully there's a few questions which we can um try and make sure we get answered real quick uh let's see i think actually most of the ones that we wanted to talk about are probably been answered but if you see some ian that you could elaborate on maybe do that yeah i did put a link to the slides in there but i will update them uh as well well i'm putting links in the chat too so some of those links are in the slides okay so let's talk about the cloud some more specifically so these are some actually these are work in progress i don't think these are completely finished but those are included in here this is just some getting started with azure with rad studio and there's some links in here for some more information um i will actually jump out there is a um ah where's that no sorry there it is i'll put the link in for this so this is a webinar um from uh july such months ago with a replay here on getting started with azure cloud development in delphi so that is a great place to go check out for more information on that um with glenn duffke and steven ball they're know a lot more about azure than i do but uh that's a great resource there and then he's the one that made these other slides i was just sharing here so um definitely check those out but if any so actually let's take a step back um with what is azure so azure is a like a collection of cloud services much like amazon's aws now um i know wagner you've done a lot with amazon aws have you done much with azure as well or are you mostly an aws guy mostly aws i try azure sorry just for fun but didn't use it in production yeah okay so i found that it's a uh so google has their own cloud platform as well and um horrible just also use it yeah yeah so it what it is the thing though that takes a while to get your head wrapped around is that all of these are a collection of things they're not just a single project or product or service it's a collection of services right so there's um so for example here's a a blog post stephen baldi on azure translator services right with so that's part of the azure cloud it's running in the azure cloud but it is not hosting it's just translator services so there's a whole collection of these services that are bundled under the azure umbrella and there's a lot of different ways different things you can use it so depending on what you're using in azure the way you do that is going to be different so for example um c data offers data connections to azure table data right so that's a tape a database a table of data in the cloud but that's not connected to like translation services so again there's a a a whole bunch of different things in there so talking about azure you need to be talking about some specific things with azure that you might be doing with it um so uh actually wagner what were the some of the things you saw in comparison with azure and aws that probably let's start with that what's a some comparative what kind of do you see some of the differences there uh well as i said i've not used at asia too much but uh i think asia is uh the the choice is made for people choose asia because of the high integration with microsoft services so with uh if you use sql server uh if you use uh net for example it's very integrated and windows itself so it's uh and i believe it has some also good integration with office services so microsoft tried to jump in the in the cloud and i think it's it uh they were very successful in accomplishing that i uh i i remember seeing uh numbers from microsoft saying that uh the the cloud is already a significant part of the microsoft income which is a kind of a big accomplishment given that amazon was dominating the market for as a very earlier than microsoft so i i believe it because it's because of the the smooth integration with the microsoft ecosystem so if you jump it like we like we say i put my apple ecosystem i believe there is also this microsoft ecosystem that you can benefit from if you use azure regard regarding the services i believe the core services both have uh amazon has more than 200 services i believe asia has a lot of services as well so it's hard to do a comparison comparison of what services each offer but i believe the basic ones like virtual cloud uh databases artificial intelligence uh things like cues and things like that i think translation i think both have have options for that yeah so actually microsoft has an azure versus aws page here apparently azure is cheaper should well let let me see let me talk about my experience uh the impression i have i had is that azure i actually i tried the very basic one which was i launched a virtual server with microsoft azure i had the feeling that it was slower than amazon one uh if you take anna and it happens with other uh providers if you take these specs it's the same it's like uh 512 megabytes of memory of ram and one or two virtual cpus but i have the impression it's just the feeling that the machine is lower i'm not sure if it's if it's true i didn't do any benchmarks but uh so it's it's it's hard to compare and both have uh free tiers like you are you are mentioning that i believe azure has even more free options like if you have i believe if you have microsoft action pack you have uh a couple of hundred dollars free for azure for azure services every month i believe i'm not sure yeah yes that is correct per year yeah and i was going to add that my experience has been so that there's a lot that's offered for free but you have to pay attention more than once i thought i was using something for free but there was like a check box i ticked someplace that then now i'm getting charged something and i'm like what i i'm not even using i was just testing this and now i've got a bill at the end of the month actually i i had a problem with amazon i i got uh i have a very low uh deal i believe for my for for our standards but suddenly one month we get i believe three or four hundred dollars uh it's worth like much more than we use it to pay and because uh uh i have enabled some certificate we are talking about certificates here uh it was kind of if you use a certificate for your web service it's free but if i i believe i enabled some certificates whatever that was very expensive it's like 200 dollars per month and and actually i asked the amazon team and they kindly refunded me most part of it but that's not usually the case so you indeed have to have pay attention i believe azure has it amazon has it a budget controller so that alarm that you set which you can define like if my bill goes above 50 bucks or 100 dollars then you warn me so i take action so if you if you hire some expensive uh if you if you are account it's expanding something you know in advance or at least you know quickly so you can't shut down whatever is charging you if you if you sign up sign up for the whatever cloud services you do look out for this these alarms so you don't get surprises by the end of the month yeah definitely enable the budget things because it's so easy to go over yeah we especially especially with virtual servers because um you sometimes just start these things up or databases you start these things up test something you get distracted you don't shut them down and they go by the minute and depending on what kind of configuration you have that can get into your money pretty quickly even if you have a free package at first at some point it is not no longer free use it or don't use it it is by time not by usage it's by compute cycles as well sometimes uh i i totally interesting about um money bills you know not bills as in legal bills but um there's a really good article by netflix which i really should find uh and i'll find the link in a minute where they talk about how they deliver um movies to people and how their content delivery network works or worked jim we can see your screen just fyi yeah i just shared it yep cool okay i didn't want you to like put some budget up they shouldn't oh what's he doing it's going now this is my personal test account i set up i thought i had a budget on here but i don't but um well netflix um what they do is that it's not azir although it wasn't i don't know whether do users do now but they use um amazon virtual machines and they spin up a virtual machine for the customer um i don't know if they've now expanded out into multiple customers customers per virtual machine but there the engineering technology behind the scenes for what they do is very complicated because if you think about it you might want to have it on a phone device or you might want to have it on a tablet or you might be streaming it to a smart tv or it could be a roku box or it could be um something like that so he goes into quite a lot of detail about um how they do things and he said um at one time he got some i think he said he got like a phone call at three o'clock in the morning where some event had happened and everybody was streaming everything on netflix and they they suddenly realized that there was just a massive bill that was about to come because of all the virtual machines that got spun up because all the customers got online and you know wanted to stream it and and uh i guess they probably have some custom billing now things like that but uh we have also had similar problems that um if you've got a virtual server and it's you know you're just spun it up like a azure machine or something like that and it's serving up some data or it's processing some data and it gets hacked or someone tries to hack it for a denial of service um if you don't set a budget up you can suddenly get a bill very quickly if you haven't got any alerts for many hundreds if not thousands of pounds or dollars and we've had an incident where um some person to be nice about them uh they were connecting to some wi-fi bridges so they had some hardware plugged into the um wi-fi bridge that didn't do wi-fi wi-fi bridge then sent an internet connection up to an amazon server but it would be the same for azure and was you know processing the data and whoever set that up didn't think about security very well and some smart person uh got onto that bridge and connected their laptop to the bridge and started streaming movies so all of a sudden this wi-fi bridge was streaming movies and it happened to be because of the configuration going through our virtual machine and the virtual machine had a certain limit of data that it would process because normally it's only processing you know small packets of data and all of a sudden now it's streaming gigabytes of movies and and we found out you know when the customer came and said well how come i've got a bill for 500 pounds or whatever it was when i was expecting it to be eight pounds uh uk so um you know virtual machines is very very useful but you've got to set limits you've got to set budgets and you your security is a whole different ball game from when your normal office where your isp and your firewall on your your router are doing a lot of the hard work for you out in the internet it's it's anybody's game really yeah um one other thing actually so i have a friend that does the uh perfect he works a company does professional services where they manage like cloud services for people so um like a company needs cloud services his company comes in and it helps make sure that it manages and is working as they want it to and he said one of the biggest things that um challenges people run into is that if a company is migrating from physical servers to cloud servers is that before they're like okay we have these um 25 physical servers so we're going to make 25 cloud servers and have them running all the time and that is really expensive but the key is that you want it kind of like ian was talking about that netflix spins up the servers as they need them and that's the key is that if the server is sitting there doing nothing you don't want it running and so you have uh something that spins up those servers as they're needed so that you're not paying the uh compute cycles on them when they're doing nothing so uh that's one of the things you're keeping track is to only spin up the things that you need on the cloud services and again it depends on each thing you're doing on here is going to have different um different billing attached to it so you really need to understand that so uh it's worth it's certainly worth getting a book on whichever one you're using azure or amazon and doing a little research on that for sure another thing you have to pay attention is to data transfer i'm not sure about azure but i think it's the same they charge you by data transfer as well especially they don't charge much uh about the in transfer which is the data that goes from the internet to your cloud services but they charge more for the auto transfer which is the data that comes from your server to the internet and as insta for instance we had a website in wordpress and it was getting kind of expensive because uh the web server the website was getting popular so it had lots of visitors and we made a mistake to put some uh installer in the to be download from from the the wordpress so people were downloading our styler which is a big file so lots of people downloading with get easily we got easily by the end of the month uh terabytes being downloaded so that was kind of expensive so you also have to pay attention to that so the data transfer try to minimize or pay attention to it don't do the mistakes that we did for example to put a file to be download from the cloud server so we pay more for the transfer so we move it from to a cheaper service generally for the download and it it got cheaper yeah so that's a really good point is that you have your solution in the cloud is going to have multiple parts to it so you're going to have the um you can have so the files that you're providing for download can have different there's uh what they're called on azure but there's some places you can put files that are um for files that don't change very often for example and those are cheaper bandwidth transfers and so your installer you want to put there right and then the other or there may be a cdn type service they offer where it replicates your data on servers in multiple locations but then the uh date there are other places you can store things that are very they're designed for files that are changing frequently and those are the most expensive so you know your your uh if you're hosting a wordpress service right your downloads need to be on the separate one and not wordpress for example is going to be on a instance that has the ability to execute php and so when you're executing php you're actually um doing cycles right you're you're doing something generally in wordpress it's not doing a lot but it's not just a static file and so that's the most expensive place there so you kind of have to to think about it and architect where you're putting things and definitely pay attention to your dashboard that's probably going to be when you uh start something on there you're going to be looking at your dashboard probably multiple times a day to make sure you've done it right because it can uh it can go sideways quickly unfortunately i i always for my own personal sites i always choose hosts that do unlimited bandwidth because you know as an mvp you put yourself out there quite a lot and and some people are nice and the odd random person takes offence to you and decides to uh um you know do things that are not in keeping with what you designed your stuff for and uh and what i don't want is to get us to sudden surprise bill so i do put budgets on but also i i prefer unlimited bandwidth hosts for my own things for corporate stuff we always um choose a big bandwidth based on um our projections we always uh add a mult a factor more than the biggest projection we could think of and then set a hard limit on that so that at certain levels and i think azure support this and amazon definitely support this as well where they will send you notifications saying you're 50 of your bandwidth allocation you're 75 you're 80 yeah 85 oh dear you've gone over so that um you know you've got plenty of warning if you're unlucky let's say reddit suddenly takes a liking to your site uh yeah and you or slashdot because back in the day that used to be the thing that you would get slash dotted and what that meant was that someone on slashdot mentioned your very cool uh application or web page or picture of a coffee pot on the internet and all of a sudden you went from you know 10 hits per day to 100 000 per hour which sounds ridiculous but actually could happen and that's when you find out how efficient your web pages are and how big your images are not uh or or are and then your bandwidth you look at a gigabyte of bandwidth and it's nothing it's absolutely nothing um in today's day in day and age um you know a gigabyte per month of transfer is actually not an awful lot um so we usually look at terabytes of bandwidth for our big servers um most of them are cost effective i mean you're talking about very small amounts of money hosting has become it's one of those things that's become cheaper and cheaper and cheaper because of the competition with this year and aws but as you offer services that other people don't do apart from amazon a lot of things that is yeah virtual desktops um where you are literally got a pc that appears out of the uh the clutter desert cloud and that has now i've used the uh the amazon versions of those that it's a really a powerful thing to have and you're you could you you pay for the the performance of the hardware and with those i don't think you pay for bandwidth on those because you're paying there it's you're paying for the uh the host they factor it in and just work it out from there i think they just let you get away with so much i think if you started being onerous but really they know how much bandwidth you're downloading because it screens so they can tell exactly how much information you're you're downloading but um windows 365 which is um i think i've got a link up for it somewhere let me just uh yeah windows 365 is uh i'm going to put it in chat window um is the new version i i think it's the new version of azure virtual desktops and it's aimed at businesses and what it does is it takes a pc and encapsulates it as a little virtual machine so it's almost like having a vm but it's on microsoft cloud and um everything just appears magically on your machine and and off you go now my wife's company use it um a similar offering from a zero virtual desktop so what they do is you can have all your applications installed on that desktop go to a different pc log in and bing there's your pc and it includes i checked with it yesterday because i knew we were going to be talking about this includes all of your stuff that's installed on there so unlike citrix server which has a kind of pre-arranged library of applications which you pick from and then you've got a citrix desktop this is a little bit more like a personal pc experience as opposed to citrix which is more like a pc that is a generic one that's slightly customized for you and that's the difference we tested our applications on this and it worked fine they're delphi applications they're written in delphi 10.33 and 10.42 so i can tell you they work fine and we also tested them with some server client server stuff that was um doing mysql to a virtual server which was hosted on amazon server actually has happened that worked fine as well so you know all of this technology it's new but it's not new it's just an iteration or a kind of reworking and what was already there with a better name it made sense to call it winners 365 but like i say it's really aimed at businesses rather than end user consumer i think you know i i guess you know now is okay so this is look at this a while ago they've changed it now so is this this is per unit per month is there a minimum number of users on here not uh um no i think you can go from one upwards i could be wrong though because that's actually that's actually a really good deal um yeah let's just check that um maybe there is a limit they might just usually microsoft do this they say five people so you know you're looking at a little bit more than 31 dollars a month when it's finding you but um 45 users yeah see that's another thing you'll save up to 16 they started doing this oh you've already got a license for so and so well we'll actually knock that off the price of your offering so if you sign in with the microsoft windows um account that has got certain privileges like um i think exchange and office and a few other things then they actually give you a discount because they say well you've already got that license so you don't want to do it again what they're trying to do is get you dragged away from your physical pc onto their infrastructure so that they've got that repeatable business because software as a service which is what this is it's really desktop as a service and uh and uh you know that's the way microsoft wants to go you know i'm sure um because you're all smart that's rather me i just talk a lot but uh yeah there yeah but uh they microsoft basically reorientated themselves with windows 10 um and what they did was they went you know what windows is a really good thing for us because it makes us important in the world but that's not our main revenue stream and in fact it's so not our main revenue stream that we need to focus away from the home user and get people using azure because the thing about azure is that it's suitable for businesses and it's almost a really say yes kind of solution because they're trying to make it so that um they predicted the future i mean i still own bill gates's road ahead book um that's supposedly you know predicted the internet and did a very bad job of it but um it's where they focus on they said azure is our future the cloud is our future they could see it coming desktop as a service software as a service that's the way microsoft are headed that's why windows 10 windows 11 is free because if you look at what windows 10 does it's becoming more and more cloud linked you know did you notice for example that microsoft office now almost by default stores everything on one drive why they're doing that it's not because it's very nice for you because it is convenient if you've got more than one pc but also because it's getting you used to the idea of your documents don't sit on your pc your documents actually sit in the clouds there are benefits to that it's a free backup uh you know microsoft's data centers are probably not gonna get struck by a tornado unlike my office which probably is um but once you get to the point where you've got a virtual desktop that is completely in the cloud then microsoft you know it doesn't matter what hardware you use who cares if you've got a macintosh go ahead log in with your mac because your desktop is what we provide we provide as microsoft and azure so this is why zero is important to microsoft and why it's important to us as developers because microsoft got very very deep pockets and they are trying to push us into making sure their pockets remain stuffed with cash in a nice way in a very useful way but even so that is their business model amazon have yeah focus the the the um adobe photoshop is the same way as you the latest versions of photoshop you pay can't you can't buy photoshop anymore you pay a monthly fee for it and then it wants to save all your files in the cloud and stuff it it's so there is some convenience for this but it is one of those things that um if you're not if you're actively using it it's a good deal but as soon as you're not actively using it and you're just paying the fee for sitting there then that's when you really start to get in trouble as far as costs go uh unfortunately and that's the same thing with these right if you're actively using it then it is a big it's a good deal um so i just looking this this is crazy this is the the services you get in the free this is not all the services they offer but it's the free services they offer and oops i don't have the screen on pause but there's a lot here that you can use um so there's their their database cosmodb cosmos db oh and there was a question here about using um uh running delphi functions in the cloud and so glenn covered that in his webinar he did i put a link in for that um but that's the ability to put a uh put your you're not putting a full program in the cloud you're putting basically writing a function and putting in the cloud so you're letting your um you know you're defining a single function and you're putting that on the cloud to run and then you can then call that and you're paying per execution effectively yeah i just put a link to glenn's interview today because it's actually gone live on the blog today we've interviewed glenn as part of our fantastic i'm just going to knock knock wagner on camera as well why guy fill your form out sorry he wants to do the interview he's sent you he needs to get that he's like i'll get back to the answer soon i'm like yeah of course you will yeah we'll see how that works yeah wrangling developers to get pieces of paper out of them is is tricky i don't know how you do it jim i really it doesn't it doesn't hurt wagner it doesn't hurt yeah exactly um so it's uh johannes johann actually your hand yeah your hands sorry um holger should be saying that name i'm sure it's german but maybe not um he's saying uh beware of uh inter-cloud connections like talking from aws to azure um ai downloading the backup roguely can become costly okay well uh ai apis are different thing altogether um i think he's talking about um models and stuff like that being downloaded but most apis don't really download anything they just provide results it's usually by rest you send a rest request and that comes we've got tons of articles on the blogs about that go go to blogs.embarkaderog.com and you'll see all about it but i mean it's a it's a problem we used um amazon s3 for back backups and every month there is a story in techcrunch or something like that about someone using s3 as a backup which is an amazon service but um azure do a similar thing where they've stored data in an s3 bucket as it's called which is just like a little lump of data and and the backup is uh available to the whole world by accident uh now i don't know why amazon don't make it so that by default it is available to everyone but uh it happens all the time my local um local authority round here just got caught with that one uh all of their uh voter data or something random like that was available to the world which was uh as you can imagine in texas that was a very popular thing to have happen but um you know be careful with clouds you you know your security is the first and foremost thing you've got to think about i think so that actually brings me to a good point if you're doing working with the cloud the so if you're managing your program on github which is oh i guess github is not technically part of azure but it's owned by microsoft so they have a lot of integrations here but you don't put your secrets for accessing your um for example cloud or whatever in your source code you put it in your secrets area of the of github and so this is where you store your keys that give access to it and so then only you as the manager the the owner of the repository have access these keys and so even though this project is public and i may have other collaborators on there they can't access the keys directly unless i give them access to that so you keep your keys separate from that and so unfortunately people all the time check in code with their keys in their code for accessing these cloud services and boom as soon as you do that someone's grabbed them if you've posted them publicly so always make sure you're storing your keys in the secrets area of your repository even if you're even if your project is private a private repository you still don't want to put your keys in there because you may some point in the future say oh we're going to make it public now and even if you remove your keys it's still in the history someone can go back to your check-ins and find it doesn't doesn't work to change to delete your keys because it's there in the history you have to squash you have to squash the comments down they they do actually scan regularly for um keys that you've included and secrets that you've included and they do send you a message um because i know some of the reaper i'm on a big number of different organizations and repos on github i use github all the time and uh and the amount of people that accidentally check in stuff they shouldn't is quite astounding and uh and i get messages as part of that group saying hey did you know you've got uh so and so uh uh checked in and they scan it they must scan it very regularly because it's usually within a day or two of it going out i don't know whether they do it when it's uploaded i'm sure they don't but uh the only way to recover from that usually is to actually change the credentials yes you know it's too late by then people checking in for any of the mvps that are watching if you blog for our blogs.com make sure before you check your code in and make it public that you have taken out your test api keys and things like that because um the number one thing that i do because i'm nice as another developer is before those blogs get posted i strip out anything that you've accidentally left in and put put your secret key here because uh some very experienced programmers and i'm sure i've done it myself in the past as well check in secrets into things like github and and if it's for something like azure api and it's your test key and you forget about it and then a month down the line you've got your credit card details stored against it and all of a sudden now it's active someone downslopes your example program and goes oh they don't know what they're really doing with it but they're taking your example program and now they put it into their own system they don't understand what it does but they're using your code which happens to have your key in it your credit card is associated with that key not with anything else that they're doing they deploy out to a thousand people or something random like that and you get a nasty surprise when a bill comes through the mail or something that you've completely forgotten you've done and uh this um this happens that happens that happens quite easily especially when you present at conferences or if like or if you do trainings and you have to copy paste them if you don't prepare because if you do live demos you can't prepare so i started using separate files with classes with helper classes that insert these but generally one good thing is i and i think azure does this too um and it's definitely something that google offers for the map services and that microsoft azure offers for the map services you can limit the keys to certain domains and certain ip addresses so for me that means i have to because i don't i have a dynamic ip most of the time at least every couple of days i have to update it but i don't run the risk if i ever do a presentation on zoom that something leaks out you know and somebody generates like hundreds and hundreds of dollars in cost like translation apis are exceptionally expensive like they go you know this well e and that these things go by the word and uh that can get expensive quite fast yeah they decide to translate some great big white paper of 75 pages long and 15 000 words and all of a sudden let's see let's see how good this works with our user manual we always wanted to have that in simplified chinese well you know people do people unfortunately do use automated translations to translate documentation we all know that from having you know unpackaged some flat pack or something like that and it's there's something random about putting a cat in a washing machine i'm thinking you're like what and you look at the diagram and it's screwings i'm screwing and they just happened to translate it from the chinese into english with an automated tool yeah david david cornelius points out there's also um if you use online versioning systems like github gitlab i'm sure bitbucket has it too you can enable security for this git guardian is one of them and they're not sometimes they're not free depending on what you do but sometimes it's worth paying 10 bucks a month so your repository is protected instead of paying thousands of dollars for your secrets getting up well google maps explicitly starts with oh my phone's trying to answer me because i said the word google uh google maps always listening um google maps is uh um by default is restricted uh which is exactly the way i think it should be so if you want to broaden it out into being more permissive and more promiscuous to other websites you know maybe your one website is a feed for other websites then you actually have to explicitly go in and and broaden out that that range and in fact by doing that it makes the examples they provide harder to use but it means it's also harder to accidentally run up a bill i respect them for that there's not often i've got a good word to say about google's business practices but that is one of them i've got gotta get a uh you know a bit respectful because um zero and people like that don't often do it that way they they just let you you know love a bill and uh and try getting a refund that's that's the next thing that's difficult with these services it's uh it can be extremely difficult to go back and say hang on i i didn't mean this you've let people use my site and they say no it's your mistake we'd like our money please continue to get out of your credit card and if you cancel your transaction with a credit card we'll come and get you yeah not scared of us yeah now they haven't got that much money to sue me i'm sure so there's a few there is a question about if there's any so delphi does include the azure api um it is shipped with delphi but then there's also some other libraries pms cloud pack is a great resource for people wanting to build cloud these are phenomenal components uh includes a bunch of them related to microsoft and azure as well as other platforms we have google and amazon's on here too isn't it let's see amazon and i'll mention one thing about the fnc if you go to the fnc stuff on the left fnc club pack because i want to point that out a lot of people are confused the fnc controls can be used in the vcl web via monkey and lazarus so you buy one set you can use it everywhere and the new feature that is part of the fnc um cloud pack is that you can switch dynamically between the services so you drop a for example if you want to store data in the cloud you drop a storage component on the form and then you have a services property where you can select the service be it dropbox hibik or all the other ones that are possible that i because i'm nervous uh don't remember right now on top of my head but there are many drive yeah google drive google drive yes thank you jim and you can switch between them so you can decide if you want to give your customers the opportunity to select which one they want to use or you can develop your software for all of them depending on which model you you want to use for for because obviously you need a key in order to access these cloud services but that's something i wanted to point out that these services can be used dynamically the same for the translation services you drop the same component then you can switch between the different translation services and of course with the fnc maps you can select between all the different mapping services that are out there also dynamically at runtime you can switch the different services that you want to use that's really cool i actually think thinking so i've looked at a few services that will let me combine my all my cloud services into one storage into one but none of them are exactly what i want and i'm thinking i'm just going to get f and c cloud pack and do that myself so i just have one bucket and it just puts it everywhere yeah it's the same methods you you have move you have delete you have copy and it's it's really an abstract way to develop against the cloud because you don't need to know what the customer selects and obviously you can include that into your user interface that the user selects it or you can also make it part of a configuration file um it is really up to you how you model it yeah all access is the package you need we might as well we got them on the page that you know you get everything man and the fnc's i i like the fnc stuff i have to say i i've made no secret before being a big fan of tms it's a bit tms heavy here because we've got wagner who's obviously a tms guy as well and a holger but you know they do do good services and these um cloud packs are very useful um with with all these component vendors and tms being the one that's on the screen at the moment it just saves you so much time and effort that's the really great thing because i'm i keep telling people i'm very lazy i just want the components to do everything so what i like about delphi you know i just oh i'd like a program to do this the first thing you do is google to see which components are available to do it for me and then i just set the properties and go i've done it i'll have the money now please you know even if even if uh holder and wagner were on here i'd still say yeah go out to tms and check out their stuff they honestly you get and i love tms team that's a great devexpress has great components a lot of other components but realistically you should have all access or one of these from one of these amazing tech partners because whatever program you're going to build 90 of it is and you're done you know the the power in the grids that you get there it's like i need a pro because there's so many people out there they're using excel for something that excel is not meant for and you can drop one of these powerful grids on there and you've replicated everything excel does and now you can make it work like it's supposed to work for what they're doing with it and it's i get goosebumps thinking about it it's just so cool realistically that that's one of the things i love about the delphi ecosystem is this component model it really is the original low code right except it lets you write all the code you want to write to do everything so yeah i would like to give an example jim that is just as fascinating because um just yesterday i downloaded a dbf file which is a dbase database and uh obviously and and then i simply dropped a couple a couple of um five fire deck connections and a batch move component on a form and i was able to without running the application just as at design time you're able with delphi without writing a single line of code to convert this dbase file which is it is at least it has been created as part of a shape file um it was like created 20 30 years ago and you have now i was able to create a sqlite firebird into base microsoft sql so all the problems were gone without writing a single line of code and of course as the design time can be compiled you were you would be able to provide this as a tool to your customer hey simply convert your old databases into a new format and you're done you know and there's simply no other tool available uh that gives you that comfort to do it in a visual way with the form designer or data module you know it's just amazing well jim jim said the magic word the original low code and that and i know that sounds like there's some kind of like sales phrase i mean i find it funny to hear about local these days well this is the thing that we need to explain because the point is obviously you know it would be difficult for you to go to the blog and not see us mention low code but the reason is if it's something you're good at you flaunt it i mean you know if you if you are uh um you know good at swimming you're going to impress people by swimming if you're good at cooking you cook for people if you're good at doing low co development then you talk about the fact you're good at doing low carb development and that's what we do you know i i think we're probably preaching to converting because most of people watching this are probably dealthy people but so they they don't need to be convinced why they should have delphi the people are not prepared to consider delphi and you say but you're doing it this way and it's so much extra work let me show you what i can do with the delphi program the set components or well i'm gonna have to pay for the components you pay a hundred to two hundred dollars for the components how much are you gonna pay your contractor to do that work i can get it done in four days they can get it done in three weeks how much are you paying them it's cheaper it's cheaper to do because i'm not having to write so much code because it's already done and most of it is draw stuff on the screen we were there pretty much the first you know delphi one was one of the original loco tools i know visual basic was also very similar at the time but visual basic went off into the atmosphere and blew up um but we're still around and we've done nothing but iterate and improve on that which is why all three of the guys on here apart from gym are mvps you know and jim was a big champion of delphi before he he worked for embarcadero but you know we keep saying to people this is the way to write code and the way to write it i find it funny because i i'm old enough to see things repeating and repeating yeah it's always it's always hype new hyped names for the same thing so i i remember the delphi community was was mocked by other other development communities because well delphi is not a development too it's do not code it's just drag and drop that's not coding and things like that and i'm doing javascript here and java and this is how we code etc the use of the content and then and that's certainly low code is is is the new thing which is was delphi one the idea of delphi the five one was a kind of low code that's so these are the kind of people that obviously want to do everything the hard way so you think well if you want to make your life difficult go ahead i mean you can drive down the road blindfold if you want to but it's probably safer if you actually do it the easy way look where you're going and this is something about you know adelphi is extremely frustrating for people who just will dismiss stealthy without even trying it oh no it's delphi it's pascal try it try it be quiet and try it because if you sit down and you actually i mean i can say this kind of thing because i'm 62 and a big guy try delphi or else but you know i mean it is incredibly frustrating and you know luckily there are younger people coming along who carry this sword uh ironically holger's one of the younger people but glenn glenn is also a young result there are some people that actually get it and we're doing our best as mvps to try and explain why i mean i can tell you now if i didn't believe in delphi i would not be doing what i'm doing because i i you know could not um push forward something that i didn't believe in i can talk nonsense for a long time but even i eventually have to have some kind of uh substance to lay all that on top of and this is what i'm talking about um can i just ask they've got some questions one of them's from danny wind we all know danny a very good developer um he's saying what are our thoughts on azure open id i have to say i've not used it um so i don't know anybody else used it at all not used as your open id i've used open id before um but and i like the idea of it honestly i've not seen the azure one though but i'm it's something i'm gonna look at i think open id is a good idea it's this it's a it's a federated login like single sign-on type thing so it's if you're inside a company right you have like uh active directory or whatever open id is kind of similar to provide that ability except it could be across multiple websites or whatever it used to be really big so it was really big for a while and then microsoft and google and everybody else started saying oh well you can use our services to provide that same thing and so people can log in with their existing accounts and that's true and actually those are kind of based on open id but the problem with those is that let's say you go to it's the tracking thing i guess this is the tinfoil hat part of the conversation but it it there was actually a article while back where some company was using github for i think it was github no it was google anyway they're using google had google log sign in on their site so the people could come there and sign in with google and so google was able to see how many people were using their service because everybody that signed into it used google and they could see who their customers were and google said hey uh their competitor we should buy them because they're getting a lot of customers and they they could see that and they just went and bought them now maybe you want to get bought by google and maybe that's a good thing i don't know but they're it's a it's one of those things that you need to be aware of that if you're using one of these other services instead of um straight up open id then you are giving them information from your from your uh everybody visits your service but yeah this looks interesting out there check it out dara says assembler is low code pat i think you're being naughty there i think you mean low level code nice that's right though who's gonna actually comment on the low code thing so idea acquired lansa a couple years ago now maybe a year ago and i actually got on it as soon as i saw the news that was coming i got on and was chatting with autonomous and i'm like lanza looks like delphi with more steps with more restrictions but and he said that the difference is is that lansa is for or delphi is low code for people that want to be able to write code right lance has low code people that don't want to have to ever write code you mean you still write code in lansa but the idea is that and that and that's actually really i think important differentiation between delphi and traditional low code is that delphi is written in delphi all the way down right and so every component occasionally i'll get someone that's like hey i want to do x and i'm like oh tms is the component for that no no no i don't want to buy tms i want to just do a delphi i'm like tms components are written in delphi so you could write all that yourself like no no i want to have it built in i'm like well it is built in it just depends on how much code you want to write do you want to write a lot of code or we want to pay tms a little money you know and so that's kind of the difference but uh yeah that so delphi is low code but it's also for programmers that want to be able to write code and don't want to ever be um locked into you know restricted too much honestly i think as logan that in the beginning that delphi is the easy of visual basic and the power of c yes yeah so and i could i had a friend that used to work for uh a company that was a vb consulting shop and he was the he was one of two delphi developers and had 100 vb developers and his job in the delphi developer's job was to make all the activex components that the vb apps would use and so the v they were the the vb developers were doing integration and he and this other guy were writing the the components the functionality the deep uh powerful stuff that was being used by the vb and they kept going to the manager and like we can lay off all these vb guys and hire a couple more delphi developers and be done we don't need like no no we're a vb shop so anyway uh again as ian said we're preaching to the card in fact someone just said oh you can't get many delphi developers blah blah blah there's plenty around you just need to look a bit harder if you put a uh advert up for a delphi developer you will get people apply for it and and i mean all right i accept there are probably more uh c-sharp developers in the world and probably more python developers easily in the world but that delphi is the problem that delphi has is it's too good at doing things and keeping quiet about it and not making a fuss about it i keep saying to people you write delphi program because i write delphi programs are mass market and used by uh you know thousands of companies with millions of employees and stuff like that overall and uh the reason we use delphi is first of all i know it very well and secondly um because it works and keeps on working we can deploy the applications with minimal run times in fact no run times in most cases minimal drivers mostly no drivers um to any form of customer small customers big corporates blue chip companies uh embassies airports one one two airport it is runs on delphi programs uh i know it's an obscure place but i'm just the one i can remember off to my head brazilian embassy a few other places like that so you know those apps work and they keep on working without lots of uh trouble that's why we choose delphi more people should stop believing the hype and saying oh well you know c sharp this and so i will give you anybody that wants to be convinced why you are going in the wrong direction if you're not thinking about using delphi i'm quite happy to spend some time i'll do it do a skype chat with you if you need to i will genuinely tell you why i think you're better off going with delphi and if you don't believe me then you've lost nothing i'm not charging anything i don't want your work i've got pretty work i just want to say stop being silly don't go in that direction here's why prove me wrong prove me wrong showing me your solution why it's better and you may be right there it's delphi is not always going to be the answer but 99.9 of the time it is the answer trust me we all think so that's why we're here so um so i'm just put some more links in the chat here this is a blog post that um migration to the cloud it covers both azure and aws but it does cover azure as well so definitely check this out from softcom which is sergey um and i put also a link in for this uh is your rest example here as well oh cool so david moorhouse is saying o d o i d c is very cool much easier than samwell right i will need to check that out my dog is doing yoga behind me so my my daughter has a cat and usually the cat is locked is in her room he's not supposed to roam the entire house but occasionally get out the other day i was doing a webinar and also i'm like what in the world and looked down and sure enough the cat was actually he came by and brushed by my leg and then hid and i'm like i swear the cat was in here but i can't find it now there's a there's a creature in the house and he's coming to get me you should have picked it if it's a white cat because glenn has a white cat you should pick out and stroke it like some bond villain go yes eventually he did come out and i eventually grabbed him and did that but um although actually this is completely off topic but the craziest thing that happened one time i was in a um i think i was just talking with somebody i don't think it was a webinar i was doing a video chat with somebody and i felt like something goes on my leg i was wearing shorts and i'm like ah no okay and then i went to a next call and then i felt it again and i'm like man what's going on why's it feel like there's some mommy like i looked down and i had a millipede one of those big old long no it was a centipede centipede big o running around on my legs apparently and i didn't notice it it was ah that was really freaky yeah always be careful run around in texas because many of them will kill you kill you bite you or eat you'll eat something else that's about to bite you it just depends how lucky you are yeah so ken's asking if there's a good vb6 to delphi converter i've seen a few um his name is probably daryl [Laughter] yeah yeah hello baby it's not that difficult i mean there are similarities but the problem with bb certainly older vb code rather than bb.net or whatever it's called nowadays i i occasionally have to work on vb programs unfortunately but um certainly vb6 ruled the roost it was extremely popular and very widely adopted and i've worked on big systems that use vb6 in the background and it does things in a vb kind of way that um if you were translating it directly into delphi you you'd end up with a framework that might work in delphi but actually it would not be a very good solution it'd be better to use the delphi as a uh uh the the vb as a kind of um template you know of what you wanted if that application works fine use that as a template and then code from scratch because unless it's it's absolutely enormous it's probably going to be quicker to uh to write the code um visually translating it you know and and having a think about the structures and stuff like that you want to do vb was not not a great language and it's it's why it's basically disappeared you can use reflection if it's net you can reflect it into c-sharp and there are c-sharp converters that go one way or the other side yeah actually i was going to um mention another here we go tech partner so rem objects has uh added to elements uh mercury which is a visual basic so you can use this with the uh so oxygen is as a delphi like delphi compatible semi-delphic compatible language mercury is vb compatible then you can get their hydra and build them all together into one integrate them the other option would be to take the vb app and then turn it into activex components parts of the vba activex components and then consume that from delphi as well so there's lots of ways you can um iteratively go through it as far as doing things yeah don potts who is one of our frequent flyers hello don and by that i mean he's always here he asked a question which i can actually directly answer because i have it behind me he said um delphia on amazon fire os okay well uh i guarantee it works because here in the background is an amazon tablet i think it's in show mode so i might be able to show it directly but um oh see now i can't go off the top of my head but yeah i need to turn it off show mode but um that is an amazon uh fire hd 10 i think and it's got the latest version of amazon on it and uh that runs delphi fine i have delphi applications running on there you need to put um them across using the usb um uh you know bridge and um treat it as if it's an android uh tablet might work absolutely fine fire tv i mean if you want to do signage you know fire tv is not that expensive and the only thing the only thing i hadn't haven't figured out because i literally don't want to spend any time on it is the fire tv has a remote and not a keyboard so you have to think about how you do navigation in your app but it works fine on a fire tv so i um deploy it like a google map on fire tv and then i put a couple of points of interest on the map all in a um delphi app and it looks great on a tv you know the only thing you have to put your mind to is how to incorporate the remote i would think the remote sense you can test that easily by by creating a fire fire um a fire monkey application and then look what kind of key codes are being sent if you press certain keys on your on your remote and then you're ready to go you know and it works great and it's easy as as ian just said just um consider it an android device and that's the way to go yeah unfortunately i have actually removed the app often but i can promise you it definitely does work on on amazon it's one of the things i actually use that tablet to demonstrate to people amazon tablet apps because it's a cheap tablet and it's got multiple uses it's a kindle fire hd10 uh and if you google it it's like last year's model or something but i absolutely it definitely works um so that's a nice answer we had to give it to people yes it will work um i don't think it's officially supported by embarcadero but um if it works it works you know and i i've read it it's officially supported it's officially supported yeah and and that's going to become more relevant to people um because windows 11 which comes out i think tomorrow or day after no no sometime this week anyway um october 5th is windows 11 oh yes that's right i don't know why i got it in my mind it's september but um that comes with the uh amazon app store um which will then allow your applications to run um your uh let's get this right it will allow you to run android applications on your windows machine as if they're native apps they'll look like they're in a window and things like that but they will work and um we're not quite sure what the kind of um impact will be but i i've run android apps that are delphi apps that are installed on that tablet in a window on my machine here and also i have a um samsung galaxy 10 note 10 phone with delphi apps on it and um they are able to run in the my phone app which is um delphi's uh uh sorry a microsoft's um little bridge between android and windows and it works absolutely fine so um you know i think it's uh one of those things it's worth playing around with and see i'm just gonna see if i can find my little test app here um just to show people that it works here we go so where's my camera there is so this is uh you can't see it very well um because the uh yeah the show don't shine it on too much yeah do that that's it um so this is uh this is a um delphi app and it's running on um android note and if i go into my phone app i could actually i'm not gonna show my screen because i've got too many things on it but um if i go to my phone app and click on my phone app that same app that is running here on the um android device will actually show up in a window on my um windows 10 machine and it does the same thing on windows 11 so you know it's uh it's not by the way it's not as your related but it was just came up in the question so it's worth talking about yeah i like it i still think delphi is the sensible choice i really do think people should get a grip and start realizing that a bit more all right so it's uh we're getting close to the top of the hour here i covered a lot of a lot of things here um around azure and azure specifically there are a few more questions i'm gonna try to to dive into though as well um there is uh i do wanna just real quick say oh so actually uh i should do this we have tomorrow is the sneak peek for rad studio 11. um so definitely if you're not registered for that register for that now you you want to be on that webinar there's it happens three times so you can join the time that fits best for you uh so yeah it's the same content three different times for different time zones so definitely don't register for that if you're not on already and join us tomorrow the oh and then the other thing i want to mention is just that we are have we have one more uh on this go to webinar series and after that we're switching to a youtube stream so i'll be posting on the blogs marketer about that as well we're gonna be youtube stars hurrah does that make music influencers do we have to wear like special filters and stuff um there so chris is saying he's looking at the uh doc wiki on azure but doesn't see anything about the saml um i mean look that's not the right one no there isn't on here so you it might either you have to implement that yourself or uh find a third-party component there's the bucket that's in in there for that somebody's messaging me i'm not sure hopefully that's not important uh [Music] oh man there's a lot stuff going on okay i gotta get i'll get to that after i notice that my skype all sudden starts blowing up apparently i've got like a dozen conversations coming in cool yeah all i've got is lunch coming in in about 10 minutes oh wow okay you see hulk has got away with it scot-free he's got no camera on so we don't know what he's doing he'd be could be sitting in his hot tub out in the backyard before we know you caught me you florida boy man we need to do that we need to do a uh a hot tub uh i'm not sure if people want to see that really yeah that's true i'm just thinking about that just talking about the technical stuff because like of all the humidity and steam i don't know how that will work out yeah i might be my glasses would steam up i'd probably have to take them off and then i can't see anything so my dog's not really qualified as a guide dog he's more of a terrier and right now it's it's well over 100 degrees out i don't know if i want to be sitting in a hot tub it's 82 for us but then it's cooled down because it rains so the rest of the world's going what what does that mean it's about 35 centigrade or something like that i don't know yeah something like that 30 35 33. it's been weird wagner's in the southern hemisphere so you're at the other other side of the uh he's in the middle of winter really yeah but it's i mean i'm using shorts as well it's it's warm here finally i mean i mean brazil so winters can be a little bit cold here as well we had one we had one in february in texas and it took everybody by surprise nobody knew what to do what's this white stuff oh it's snow oh okay yeah it's not really what we do so as far as authentication goes there is a uh azure authentication com uh here so we put that in here for you chris okay um all right sorry i'm just trying to go through the questions here and make sure i'm not missing anything used to work in a hot tub factory well if we have any hot tub questions next time we can we can ask kirk so ask yeah okay cool well so thank you everybody um we'll go through real quick uh hold or anything you want to say real quick before we go uh remind people where they can find you yeah um it's it's as always it's flix engineering dot com and um practical examples i i stayed away from it during the webinar today to to advertise my books but practical hands-on examples also with cloud computing in the books and they're available on amazon if you haven't ordered them yet very good books never never be afraid to promote your books on one of these calls holder it honestly it's like if people should be buying the books because if in my opinion if you read one chapter of a book and it's useful you probably paid for the book realistically um because at least i i don't frequently don't finish here i'll just flip your web page here i frequently don't read an entire book but i will uh definitely skim it and they're usually like oh that's great and i can't more than once i've been talking to somebody um and they're like ask a question and i was like trying to answer it i'm like you know someone has a so-and-so has a book on this like okay i'll check it out and then later they'll be like i started reading that book i should have read this before i began um one of the questions is asking whether they can contact me by email about some questions uh and they are and i'm gonna put my email in the window uh because i get a very good spam filter but go ahead um you're always welcome to ask me questions the thing i will tell anybody that comes and asks me questions is that um i i reserve the right not to get back to you and uh and if you ask me too many questions eventually i'll pretend that your email didn't reach me but um but apart from that um ask away because it's all about um delphi you know it's all about um encouraging people to use delphi and helping people use delphin and and spreading the uh the um conversation of delphi so go ahead and contact me email's the easiest way i can't guarantee i'll reply and i can't guarantee how long it takes me to reply but i will reply um eventually probably um that's what i could say [Laughter] when you get caught up maybe you can help me catch up on my inbox yeah so wagner has a webinar tomorrow the 9th at 4 pm utc which is 10 a.m my time says i'm not sure that's pretty awesome that gave me a local time uh what's the webinar on tomorrow wagner yeah we're talking about uh testing tms business there is a series of webinars that uh i try to be a a little bit more like coffee and code it's like talking about the tms business behind the scenes the development stuff what it's what it's coming and also how things are done so for example tomorrow i'll talk a little bit about the testing how the testing unit test integration testing we do with it with tms business and already especially and the tools we use how we structure our tests if you're interested in knowing and talking more about testing and how test driven development helped it a lot in the in the development so tomorrow a free webinar i will get if you can join us there is the link uh that jim open there is in the in the chat and thank you again for inviting me and it was a pleasure to be here as usual absolutely i appreciate having you all right well thank you everybody for being on one more thing we have code rich germany tomorrow from embarcadero yes no that's 2021 you have to it's it's deutschland you have to type deutschland otherwise you don't find it the eu okay good the eu t-s-c-h s-c-h and l-a-n-d yes and then 20-21 yeah yeah there it is there it is and that's tomorrow at the same time when the other things are going on oh that's interesting it's busy day tomorrow yeah for embarcadero for more up tomorrow yeah yeah oh wow i see a lot of good sessions i need to learn german man yeah i'm doing that together with olaf i'm doing one about docker for delphi developers just a general overview why docker might be the thing for you and then in the evening i'm going to do basic uh getting started with web development in delphi with tms web core uh yeah fantastic all right well if you're german i know where if you understand german that's where you should be tomorrow and if you don't know german you still have time to learn come on [Laughter] every place as well language it's it's just straightforward really you know what i've got on your scrabble board and put them in one place and you've got a word there you go have you seen this microsoft translator uh have you seen the app that that you can get for it yeah it was using this during the code summer camp so i can what i found was the best is i installed the app on my phone and then just set the center on my desk and i would create a room and then i just give people the link to the room and they could log in and select what language they wanted to give it to them and it would do real-time translation for them they have an app and you can say hello my name is ian oh she's she thinks my name is a.m earthquake it it does it does a pretty good job it's not perfect but it actually does a pretty good job so in theory you could use this to encode and go to code range germany wrong because the big hispanic populations uh spanish speaking um all right apparently i need to go i have another meeting that i just found out about starting right now bye everybody hi everybody take care guys thank you

Channel: Embarcadero Technologies

Views: 693

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Embarcadero, mobile development, embarcadero technologies, application development, Software Development, Delphi, C++Builder, C++, Databases, InterBase, SQL, Pascal, Object Pascal, Delphi (Programming Language), Windows Programming, iOS Programming, Android Programming, Linux Programming, macOS Programming

Id: 1FqVSD4LBV8

Length: 115min 26sec (6926 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021