Oregon Delphi User Group

Today’s software makes great use of pretty styles, gradient shading, sliding effects, 3-D buttons, eye-catching charts, splashy graphics, and more ways to make them attractive and user-friendly. But if all you need (or are restricted to) is a simple console app, it’s appearance can seem so dull in comparison. Even adding a line of dashes or making letters all upper-case doesn’t start to compare. There is a way to add color, control screen placement, and more when generating console output if you dive into the ANSI Escape Sequences that most terminals support.

We’re taking it easy this month – no official presentation, no computers, just a get-together with programming friends out of the summer heat! We’ll be at Olive Garden in Lake Oswego, so come hungry for lasagna, salad, and breadsticks. The only exceptions thrown this month will be if they run out of breadsticks. DATE/TIME Wednesday, July 15, 2026 6:00 - 8:00 PM LOCATION Olive Garden in Lake Oswego 6355 SW Meadows Rd.

Janet Jackson asked this question in 1986. We’re asking it of AI in 2026.

But unlike Janet’s version, AI is getting better and is doing more every day. Not only is it speeding up debugging and development, it’s also enabling the creation of tools that were previously relegated to wish lists.

This month will not focus so much on what’s new in Delphi programming as it will in what not to do when managing multiple Windows servers in the cloud. Maintaining health of both the physical bodily kind and a one-man application cloud is a tricky balancing act!

They say two things in life are certain: death and taxes. Delphi applications might just be a third — and if yours is still generating revenue, that’s something to celebrate, not apologize for.

Homer Jones will present a follow-up to his talk last November, on adding AI support to his insurance agency management software. He will cover the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) method of using and controlling Large Language Model AI. We’ll discuss Theory, Implementation, Best Practices, Prompt Engineering, how to make AI execute application events, and how to keep it from wandering off on it’s own train of thought. There will be a code demonstration to show how it works as a real user assistant, even voice activated.

Sometimes, advancing technologies help make things smoother; many times, they make things more complicated. In the case of running Windows applications, moving from an office installation to a set of remote servers offers many benefits but can also negatively affect some features of what the software used to be able to do effortlessly. Tonight, we’ll share the details of how simply transferring files between a local computer and a remote software product suddenly took a dramatically increased amount of time when changing the access to the software–and what it took to resolve it.

Coding is changing shape and we will show you the future tonight!

It’s that time of year again! Yep, Advent of Code is back! How many puzzles can you solve before the meeting?

Everyone is talking about AI these days. Many use AI to help with their programming. But what if you want the software you write to use AI or provide an AI interface to its users? Are your customers clamoring for AI-enabled apps? Are you afraid of losing business if you don’t add it? What will it do?

We’ll answer many of these questions at tonight’s meeting–and show ways to add AI capabilities to an old Delphi application!