Oregon Delphi User Group

As mentioned during past meetings, a copy of Kylix 2 Enterprise was given to the Oregon Delphi Users Group to rebuild their web site and learn about and help promote both Kylix and web site development with Borland’s Object Pascal tools. That was over a year ago. Well, instead of waiting for someone to have time, we might as well just do it during one of our meetings! We will start off in Delphi 6 Pro tonight and move to Kylix 2 Enterprise at a future meeting (possibly January).

Homer Jones will present a commercial document management application built around ImageEn version 1.97 ImageEn is a set of 100% vcl Image processing components. It is a little-known, but viable alternative to ImageLib and LeadTools. While documentation is marginal, the Delphi code examples make up for the deficiency. Using ImageEn enabled Homer to build his own Twain user interface. While one might ask “why”, having a uniform user interface makes customer support much easier (you don’t need to know every user interface of every scanner manufacturer).

ModelMaker is a modeling / UML tool written in Delphi for Delphi which provides fast class design, diagramming, and code generation. It can also import existing units, provides a structured differencing engine, and can apply templates and patterns to class designs. The presenter has no vested interest in ModelMaker, but has found it to be an invaluable tool. Also demonstrated is the ModelMaker Code Explorer, which is a Delphi plug-in that provides a subset/superset of ModelMaker functionality directly to Delphi.

What do you do when an application gets too large for the OS to handle? Modularize. See how to easily create packages (.BPLs) and load them dynamically from your applicaiton. PRESENTER Kevin Stanton is an independent consultant doing business as RDB Solutions and has been working with Delphi since version 1.0 dealing with client/server databases and comes from the Paradox and IBM Mid-Range worlds.

FinalBuilder’s primary purpose is to allow developers to automate their software build process in a repeatable, predictable manner. FinalBuilder allows you to define your build process easily, allowing you to focus on more interesting and important tasks! Anyone can run the build, with one click (or keystroke!) in FinalBuilder. Builds can be scheduled via the windows scheduler, so automated nightly builds are easy to setup. FinalBuilder saves time, often doing in seconds task that take minutes or hours if done manually.

Raize Software has been providing high-quality, innovative developer tools since 1995. In this presentation, Ray Konopka will show how developers use Raize Components and DropMaster to build sophisticated user-interfaces in less time with less effort and CodeSite to ensure that their underlying code is working correctly. PRESENTER Ray Konopka is the founder of Raize Software, Inc., and the chief architect for CodeSite and Raize Components. Ray is also the author of the highly acclaimed Developing Custom Delphi Components books and the popular Delphi by Design column, which appeared in Visual Developer Magazine.

This year’s Borland Conference, BorCon 2002, highlighted .NET and the exploding Web Services market. Anders Hejlsberg, a former Borland employee now spearheading the C# language and a key participant of the .NET framework at Microsoft, gave Monday’s keynote talk and announced Delphi 7 coming later this year. These and other highlights will be shared at the June meeting by a panel of BorCon attendees from Oregon. If you couldn’t attend BorCon, you gotta come to ODUG this month!

The subject matter for this presentation is taken (with his permission) directly from Ray Kanopka’s session at this year’s Borland Conference (track 1126): “The goal of this session is to illustrate the importance of effective user interface design in an application. To reach this goal, a set of user interface guidelines will be presented that apply to virtually all types of applications. In addition, specific attention will be given to user interface design traps to which developers often fall prey.

Fred has written several statistical and image-processing components in Delphi that he will share with the group this month. The components are implemented as TClientDataSet descendents in order to leverage the power of SQL databases (where available), yet uses in-memory storage and minimal disk I/O for high speed processing. The components cover several aspects of numerical analysis including: Linear Regression, Bivariate Regression-Predicted Values, Multivariate Regression, 1-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), and more.

This session will cover some Delphi IDE tricks and tips as well as simple debugging techniques available in the IDE. Most of the information for this presentation was gathered at two workshops Shawn attended during BorCon 2002, both presented by Brian Long. Shawn will furnish examples of the tips, tricks and debugging techniques as well as provide links to Brian Long’s web site, which has many more items of a similar nature available for Delphi developers.