Oregon Delphi User Group

There is no formal presentation for this meeting. We will meet as friends in the programming industry and talk about whatever geeks will tend to discuss when they get together!

There is no formal presentation for this meeting. We will meet as friends in the programming industry and talk about whatever geeks will tend to discuss when they get together!

Are you yearning for capabilities or libraries that you see available for .NET but have a solid Delphi application that you don’t want to throw away? Would you like to start a new .NET application and utilize large sections of code or a third-party library you have in Delphi? Or what if you just want to add a plug-in architecture to your application (either .NET or Delphi) that allows for the eventual possibility of incorporating the other environment?

We don’t usually meet during the summer months of July or August, and with the future of ODUG still uncertain, this will be the last meeting for a while. We may pick back up in the fall depending on who’s in the area and the interest level. In the absence of a specific topic, we may continue or follow-up on last month’s discussion about more frequent upgrades to Delphi and the uproar over the price.

One of our regular attendees, Gene Juhos, will be leading the discussion this evening. PRESENTER Gene Juhos has been working with Delphi since version 3.

A few years ago, David Cornelius, coordinator for this group, threatened to leave the Portland area and move to California. Indeed, he had a job there and traveled there quite often, but never really left. Well, once again, David has accepted a job in another state, this time in Washington. It’s more likely this time that his move is imminent and will be permanent. Thus, coordination of these meetings will necessarily fall to those who remain and are interested in seeing it continue.

This month’s meeting will be a group effort, with various people at the wheel (or rather the keyboard). Delphi 7 was arguably the best Delphi IDE ever. It had the old and fast help screens (with examples!) and was complete enough to build robust database applications on Windows for several years. But time marches on and there are new language features, new technologies to support, and enhancements^^ in the IDE. _(^^Some people don’t consider the changes to the IDE to be enhancements, but that’s a discussion for a different forum.

We’ll explore Delphi XE5 a little more this evening and have a general chat on all things programming! One idea is to explore some of the new VCL enhancements as noted in David I’s blog. Does anyone have experience using Delphi’s Live Bindings? I’d like to see how that compares with some of the XAML/WPF stuff I’ve been dealing with. PRESENTER David Cornelius is a full-time Delphi developer and has been programming since the 1980s.

Two of our regular attendees have upgraded to Embarcadero’s latest version of Delphi and in fact, the whole RAD Studio suite. This month, we’ll crack open the packages and take a look with them. Doug Ausmus will show us his version of a “Hello World” which involves calling an external DLL to talk through a USB port to electronic circuit boards and watching LEDs blink. Gene Juhos will show us what all we get when we start a new Android app from one of the several built-in mobile app templates.

Oxygene for WPF and WinRT In September, we took a look at a simple application and how it was written using several different programming environments. We started with what we’re all familiar with, Delphi for Win32, moved to C# for WinForms which had a different language and IDE, but used similar window controls, then kept the language the same and built the app in C# using WPF, and finally used Oxygene, a Visual Studio plug-in compiler with the Pascal syntax.