A New MessageBox

Homer Jones created a new Message Dialog that solves problems with the standard Delphi 2007 ones--and even the latest ones. The two main problems are: 1) they can be hidden behind other windows, and 2) they don't appear centered on the application's main form, even when Position is set to poMainFormCenter (that seems to have been fixed in later Delphi versions, but the former is still an issue). When a dialog box is hidden, the app freezes; they are modal, but the user can't respond because it's hidden.

Writing a Welcome Page Plug-in

The Delphi IDE's Welcome Page was completely revamped with Delphi 11 and it now supports custom plug-ins. There haven't been very many written and there's even less documentation about how to do it but I dug into the samples and figured out a few things. At tonight's meeting, we'll look at the three sample Welcome Page plug-ins that come with Delphi, show how to make simple modifications to get our feet wet, then show how we can copy one to turn it into something useful.

From Go to Firemonkey

This month we'll take a small console program written in Go, show and compare its equivalent as a Delphi console program, then write a simple Firemonkey application in Delphi based on the functionality. The concepts presented will include a brief overview of the Hugo web-building framework, the Markdown files it utilizes, the TOML file format, how using GitHub Actions can launch the web-building process on a local Linux computer, and finally an introduction to Firemonkey resulting in a simple desktop app that can run on Mac or Windows to update a personal website.

February Meeting - Miscellaneous

February's meeting will be somewhat unstructured. Someone mentioned wanting to learn more about the Delphi IDE so, we'll look at the different parts of that and discuss how this powerful environment can enhance your productivity. This year's DelphiCon is in progress so we'll review some of the topics being discussed. We'll also take a look at a small program in Go I wrote to help automate parts of a website I'm building.

November - EDI

This month’s presentation is on EDI, a Business-to-Business (B2B) data transfer protocol used in just about any industry. Learn about the two biggest problems a developer will face when implementing an EDI interface during the brief overview from a developer who's used it in several industries, Jonathan Eaton.