Oregon Delphi User Group

This year’s Borland Conference was, as usual, packed full of information and previews. Diamondback and SDO were just two of the buzzwords used this year. This presentation will bring you up-to-date on the latest technology from the Borland world. Some specific items that will be presented include: DiamondBack (the next release of Delphi) hear about the new IDE and compiler features see Diamondback in action Is Kylix dead? The Borland Roadmap and SDO PRESENTER Phyllis Helton is the Information Services Manager, Analyst, Designer and Lead Developer for The JESUS Film Project where she has been programming for the past 10 years.

Come see the Ultimate Delphi at your local user group and learn everything about Delphi 2005 for .NET, Win32 and C#, including but not limited to, refactoring, unit testing, Enterprise Core Objects II, etc, etc. The list of incredibly cool stuff in this feature packed release just goes on and on. You don’t want to miss this chance to see it all, and be able to win a copy, as well as getting a show special.

RemObjects SDK is the complete remoting solution for Delphi developers. It allows you to easily build multi-tier applications, publish server logic via SOAP or a custom binary protocol (even at the same time), or even access existing WebServices from your Delphi applications. RemObjects’ concept of Smart Services (services accessible at the same time using different message formats and/or network protocols) are designed to take remoting into the future by providing all of the benefits of exisiting Web Services, but eliminating their drawbacks, which include the notoriously slow and inefficient communication via SOAP, the complex setup issues involved with DCOM, etc.

Tonight’s topic title indicates getting out in the trenches of Delphi development–and that’s exactly where we’ll be. David Cornelius will share his experience of working on a project that has several interesting aspects. The application utilizes TurboPower’s Async Pro serial port communications library, takes a screen-shot of another application using Windows API calls, has custom-written components (both visual and non-visual), and uses some new features of the recently released Raize Components version 3.

This month, David Cornelius will explore several of the recently open sourced libraries previously sold commercially by TurboPower Software, one of the largest Delphi and C++Builder 3rd-party tools vendors over the last decade. Not all the libraries available can be adequately covered in one night. Therefore, we will look at the following code packages (descriptions taken from SourceForge.NET where these code libraries can be obtained): Abbrevia is a compression toolkit for Borland Delphi, C++Builder, & Kylix.

There is no formal presentation this month. David Cornelius will provide a laptop with Delphi 6 Professional and several 3rd-party components (including all the TurboPower open source libraries). If anyone has a small project or some questions about code or techniques, please bring your questions or a disk with code that we can load to share and discuss with any others that may attend.

Learn what’s new in the upcoming release of the Advantage Database v7.0 scheduled for Fall 2003. Highlighted features for ADS v7.0 included, Full-text Search and Triggers among many others. The Advantage Database Server is a scalable, high performance client/server RDBMS for networked, stand-alone, Internet and mobile database applications. The Advantage Database Server supports many development environments including Borland Delphi and C++ Builder. Advantage Database provides native connections for most developments environments, facilitating easy integration with new and existing applications.

Borland has announced C#Builder, an IDE for Microsoft’s .NET platform and the C# language. Even if you have no intention of using C# or .NET, you should pay attention to this product because it is a major milestone for Borland. Borland has created a new IDE core, which will be used in the next Delphi for Windows and Delphi for .NET products. Also of interest to Delphi programmers is a glimpse at Borland’s new strategic focus on Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).

It’s too easy to intertwine the Graphical User Interface (GUI) with the data. But what if you want to later use the data in a different context? You either have to extract the code, or re-write it. Event-driven programming can help significantly to keep your application looking sharp and responsive while keeping the data as a separate entity. PRESENTER David Cornelius has been a developer for 15 years working mostly on the DOS and Windows platforms using Borland’s Pascal compilers.

Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL-92 features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. It has been used in production systems, under a variety of names since 1981. Much development has occured since Firebird rose from the ashes of the Open sourcing of Interbase. In this presentation some of the topics we’ll explore and demonstrate include: A brief history of Firebird/InterBase A review of Firebird’s Features What’s new since the open sourcing of InterBase What’s new in the forthcoming release of Firebird 1.

CodeWright and Delphi are a perfect combination for Delphi programmers. Delphi provides necessary tools for developing applications. CodeWright supplies invaluable tools for analyzing and editing Pascal and other Delphi code. This presentation shows some of the ways that Delphi development tools and CodeWright editing features complement each other. It first shows how CodeWright works with Delphi through environment synchronization, project creation, command line configuration and file support. It then describes some of the features that make CodeWright a useful tool for Delphi programmers.

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.

In the past few years, Human Factors engineers, Usability professionals, and Computer/Human Interaction practitioners have focused on the question of building usability into products from the outset. Leo Frishberg, local User Experience Architect will present some of the reasons to do pre-development research and design along with “discount usability” techniques and approaches. As part of his discussion, Leo will walk through a Delphi-based application designed using these techniques. PRESENTER Founding principal of Phase II, a computer based consulting service, Mr.

Dionysus due to be released in September, brings together for the first time 13 of the best Delphi components from the best VCL control 2 years running (QuantumGrid) to the best Delphi component 2 years running (Report Builder). Professional Delphi Developers already have several of these components, but for the first time everyone from Corporate development shops to independent consultants will be able to purchase all of these controls that are independently available for over $4000 for under $2000.

ExpressWeb is a new development framework from Developer Express that implements in Delphi the component architecture of ASP.Net to enable the same template driven web development of JSP or ASP but with a RAD designer. ExpressWeb contains 4 palettes of visual stunning controls to enable you to build professional web sites in the same way you build Windows application with Delphi, and with the total control that defines Delphi. Ed will give a thorough demo of what ExpressWeb brings to Web development over and above the 3 different technologies already in Delphi.

Publishing reports to remote client applications and web browsers using a standard reporting solution can be a complex, time consuming task requiring the mastery of a diverse set of technologies including multi-threaded programming, Windows Services, Windows Sockets, Windows System Tray applications, COM, I/O Completion Ports/Worker Thread Pools, XML, SOAP Services, ISAPI Thread Pools, XHTML, and JavaScript. ReportBuilder is a product of Digital Metaphors. PRESENTER Ed Dressel, ReportBuilder expert and long time member of TeamDM, will show how ReportBuilder Server Edition brings RAD to the world of N-Tier reporting enabling Delphi developers to quickly and easily deploy state of the art information publishing solutions to support remote clients and web browsers.