Oregon Delphi User Group

Here’s your chance to participate in an interactive discussion with Pervasive Software experts Chip Izard and Jim Beecher as they discuss Pervasive’s Data Management Security and Data Integration solutions. What’s in it for you? Just by showing up you’ll learn how to: Reduce the security risks to the data in your apps Manage and integrate data across or beyond your enterprise Deliver timely access to corporate information Don’t know Pervasive? You should.

This month’s presentation will be an interactive discussion on Good Coding Practices. David Cornelius will launch the discussion covering the following topics: Indentation and spacing Good naming conventions Writing robust code And why everyone needs version control! Some example code, both personally written and commercially sold, will be shown–and you’ll get to help decide how well it was written! A free tool for quickly formatting poorly-written code will be shown and a few IDE tricks for speeding up development while preserving readable style will be revealed.

How do users perceive the difference between a rich application and an online resource? What processes should developers use to capture these differences? How are projects affected by the results of these processes? Leo Frishberg, a software developer, usability consultant, and user-centered designer, will talk about user-centered design in the context of the Web vs. the desktop. Using examples from projects in both environments, Leo will point out the similarities and differences in users’ expectations, approaches, and behaviors when faced with an application or online resource.

Many times when people talk about open source, they talk about Linux or having to download source archives, read lengthy HOWTOs and follow cryptic installation instructions. And when people want really easy-to-install and user-friendly tools, they often look first to high-priced ones from big-name companies. But there are two nearly indispensible products that many Delphi developers use which are not only user-friendly and easy to install, but also completely free! The two products discussed tonight are InnoSetup and GExperts.

Given the fact that I don’t have time to put together another presentation and that people are probably tired of listening to me anyway, I’m just going to host a general question-and-answer period, a networking session if you will. We can combine that with attempts stump-the-programmer where anyone can give or take a challenge, man the keyboard and test their Delphi skills. I’ll bring my laptop with Delpi 6 Professional, Firebird, DBISAM, Access, and several third-party components including the TurboPower libraries, Rave Reports, Raize Controls 3, InfoPower 3000, Indy, CodeSite, WPTools, and some custom components I’ve developed.

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.