To all readers:
Is there a way to do this in Delphi?
May 092004
May 082004
Read the BDN pages for info and links.
May 072004
Marco Cantu gives away chapter 3 of his new (e-)book, tentatively titled “Essential Delphi 8 for .NET”. It’s a work-in-progress, so checking back on a regular basis would be a good thing. The intended audience is Delphi-developers making the move to .NET.
Thanks Perry, for spotting this gem.
May 052004
Anders has the text of the README file to be included in the upcoming Delphi 7.1 update.
May 032004
Lutz Roeder released version 4 of his Reflector, a (or should I say THE) class-browser for .NET. Here is the list of programs he made (Reflector on top), or jump to the Reflector 4 page immediately.
Yes, it supports Delphi syntax.
Apr 302004
And while we’re in the magazine department, why don’t you stop by Borland Developer News: .NET Edition?
Apr 282004
If you like Delphi, but also like non-Windows OS-es as well, you basically are going to have to pay twice or more. Each time for each programming environment (be it Kylix, or something else). Freepascal is a Delphi clone, for Win32 and Linux. It tries to do everything Delphi does, but it does not have a real front-end/IDE. Enter Lazarus. It’s not completely Delphi yet, but it’s nice to see how far they already are. Some Delphi code can be used in Lazarus/Freepascal without altering!
If you look at the Project Roadmap, you can see most of the IDE and most of the components are done and working. The rest of it (LCL, the Lazarus version of VCL, GTK, Qt, Win32) needs some more work.
This how Lazarus looks like on my desktop:
Notice the blue and green line just above and below the buttons? Quite neat: they show if components are aligned or not (then the lines disappear)! Borland, did you see that?
Apr 282004
Both Anders and Nick blog about it: Borland changed Delphi8’s license so you can safely distribute Borland.Delphi.DLL with your products and anybody creating a derative of your product (component or whatever it is called in .NET) is allowed to do that too. Great news.
As Bob puts it:
Borland.Delphi.dll is effectively distributable to anyone AS PART OF A COMPONENT OR SOFTWARE (i.e. not just by itself)
Apr 262004
I think I found the problem of my “hanging” ShellExecute. In my application I have a TRichViewEdit in which the user can do basic editing. If the user needs more, he presses the Word button, that will start Word with the appropriate document.
If I don’t edit in the TRichView first, and go straight to Word, any attempt to close Word normally fails. Taskmanager etc will work, but that will cancel all editing.
If I edit in the TRichViewEdit first, save it, and then open Word, things run smooth like a baby’s ass.
The difficult part is this: the TRichViewEdit REMOVES a graphic that is in the Header of the Word document. So I have 2 things to solve:
1: The removal of the picture
2: Word behaving strangely when the picture is still in the document
Sometimes, life is not so sweet….
Apr 262004
Today I finally downloaded and tested MaxiVista, the extend-your-desktop-with-networked-PC-screens tool. What I need to find out, is how to let the secondary display have no background, to speed things up. Although it is fast in its default configuration anyway.
Delphi works great with it. See the screenshot below.
See how windows automatically extends the PrintScreen-capture to include the extra desktop? Neat!
Update: the screenshot is garbled in FireFox, it looks good in IE. WTF?