Oregon Delphi User Group

Attributes, a language feature brought over from .NET and Java (known as “annotation”), are a language feature of Delphi introduced in version 2010 that allow annotating types and type members with special objects that carry additional information. This information can be queried at run time using RTTI, or Run Time Type Information. Along with existing OOP mechanisms (inheritance and ownership) you can now use annotations for a class and class members to further define what your classes are capable of.

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a Web protocol for querying and updating data that provides a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. We’ll see how an old technology in Delphi, WebBroker, has been able to do this for quite some time, but now there’s a cool name and a formalized protocol for it. A sample Delphi application will make obvious how simple it is to open your data to mobile devices!

Crystal Reports is a reporting application that can access data from a wide array of sources. It has come bundled with both Delphi and Visual Studio and is now also available as a web-based application. Many people have used Crystal Reports with Delphi through the years. Tonight’s presentation will be by a company that has been using Crystal Reports since Delphi 3. Crystal 8.5, no longer supported, was the last version that let you install a free runtime for every user.

Yes, this is a word play on “Tales from the Crypt” and will be a fun meeting where we share horror stories in coding. Bring your experiences of programming gone awry, the unbelievable code you’ve been handed, the strangest bugs, or the most unbelievable deadlines imposed on you and the terrible consequences that resulted. We will commiserate together and laugh at what the sales people in the organizations we work for have tried to do to us or ponder about what the previous programmer must’ve been smoking when s/he wrote the code we’re trying to debug.

Many people do not know, and fewer still actually use, a nifty feature which appeared in the Delphi IDE a few years ago: built-in XML Documentation for your source code. At this month’s meeting, we’ll show how to turn it on, how to use it, and how it can enhance developer productivity, especially if you are sharing libraries or have several units to which you are constantly referring to for reviewing a type or method.

Everyone has their favorite Delphi IDE plug-in, their favorite Notepad replacement, their favorite tricks for saving time. We’ll share these tips with each other tonight. Some of the things we’ll likely cover include GExperts, editor macros, templates, debugging and logging, build events, mapped or redirected drives and paths, WinInternals tools, dealing with UAC and 64-bit issues, and automated builds. Make a list of your favorite ways to shorten your development time and bring them to share with the others.

There is no formal topic for this month’s meeting. Our regular meeting time and place will be kept and there will be a laptop with Delphi 2010 hooked to the big screen TV, but no PowerPoint slides and no agenda. Sometimes meetings like this bring out very interesting topics!

Last summer, a member of the group brought a multi-touch enabled laptop to an ODUG meeting. Of course everyone wanted to see a touch enabled application written in Delphi. He now has a demo ready that shows some of these capabilities in a business application. The term “business application” was stretched a bit when Embarcadero came to town during the XE2 tour and explained how FireMonkey is the new way to write business applications.

The word is out. The biggest and best Delphi, C++Builder and RAD Studio release is coming soon. Join us at this free event to get a first-hand look at all the new RAD capabilities you’ve been asking for and more. With RAD Studio XE2, you will be able to create 64-bit Delphi applications to take advantage of the latest hardware, access more memory, and push the performance envelope. You will be able to deploy your applications to Windows and Mac and more.

We’ll be going over how to create XML documents in Delphi using the XML Binding Wizard to create the document from either an XSD or XML file. We’ll use a web broker based REST server to serve up the document and then read it in using a Delphi client. As we do that we’ll define what a REST server is and why it’s replacing SOAP servers. We will also look at using the web services wizard to read in WSDL from a SOAP based web service.