Oregon Delphi User Group

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.

Embarcadero’s Delphi XE5 Tour! The evening event has been CANCELLED! Instead, you are invited to Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Portland at noon. Because there were two events on this date and far many more people registered with Embarcadero for the noon event than the evening event, Embarcadero has eliminated the evening one. There will not be any meeting at the Fanno Creek Brew Pub in December. At this technical and interactive session, attendees will:

Delphi, C#, Oxygene, and JavaScript Since programming languages were invented, people have tried to use one code base to get an application to run on multiple platforms. Whether it meant building custom compilers or interpreters for each platform (BASIC, C, JavaScript, Python), or writing an API layer for each device that talks to a generic module (Java, .NET), the goal has been to reduce the time it takes to develop a product while having it work for as wide a market as possible.

General discussions about technology, the state of Object Pascal, and future meetings.

“Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.” Sounds like fun? There are several of us Delphi developers that are interested in this technology and one of our members has offered to share his passion for electronics, give us a hands-on demo, help us get started playing with this technology, and teach us a little of what you can do with it.

As web technologies become more robust and the interfaces more rich and user-friendly and as a plethora of computing devices in every size and price range fill our lives, there is a race in the industry to become a major vendor of development tools to build applications for these various computing platforms. It seems that everyone is touting theirs as the one solution you need to cover all devices, minimize development effort, and provide the best experience for the users of your software.

On February 5, Embarcadero announced the purchase of a popular third party data access component library named AnyDAC. They have rebranded the library FireDAC for consistency with their new FireMonkey brand, although FireDAC doesn’t rely on FireMonkey in any way. FireDAC ships with the Enterprise, Ultimate and Architect SKUs and may be purchased by Pro users as a component pack. In the end, this appears to be a replacement of the dbExpress stack that Embarcadero has previously developed internally.

One of the advantages of using modern development environments such as Delphi is to hide the complexities of displaying controls on a form. Simply place a button or a grid or a label on your form and it looks and behaves like a button or a grid or a label should without any special work. But what if you need to do something that is not covered by the standard set of properties?

For many projects today, it is not enough to work in Delphi. Projects extend to the web. At our January meeting we’ll be exploring how to work with HTML, with an emphasis on the newly-approved HTML 5 standard. Our vehicles of exploration for this presentation will be Delphi and HTML5 Builder. We’ll look at what works - and doesn’t - with these Embarcadero tools. There will also be an open discussion of people’s favorite HTML editor.

Exciting new versions of Delphi and RAD Studio are coming soon. Be among the first to see what’s new in Delphi XE3 and in RAD Studio XE3 – including Delphi, C++Builder, Prism, InterBase and new HTML5 Builder at one of these free, live, launch tour events. Get ready to develop apps for Windows 8. Learn how to give your existing VCL and FireMonkey apps a new Windows 8 look and functionality.

There is no formal presentation this month. We’ll meet and eat at the usual location and talk tech–or any other subject that may come up. A laptop with Delphi 2010 will be hooked up to the big screen TV if we want to explore some topic or pull out a demo from a prior meeting.

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!