[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] One control that I have not seen in the line-up of new controls in the VCL for Tiburón is a size grip. Most people may not even realise that this control exists, even though it is part of Windows itself and is really quite useful. Fortunately, implementing it ourselves is truly trivial.
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] Last weeks poll asked which was your first Delphi version. It may or may not come as a surprise that the results essentially provided a list of Delphi versions largely sorted by age. The one exception was that (of visitors to this blog) more gained their first Delphi experience from Delphi 2007 than from Delphi 2006, which would support the impression I am increasingly gaining of a resurgence in interest in Delphi having started in the last year or so.
[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] With apologies to those who have downloaded what I wrongly claimed was the “final” version a few days ago, I found an error in one of those last minute “improvements” I mentioned. I also took the opportunity to incorporate a couple of refinements that others suggested (thanks CR). A new version is now available for download and contains the following fixes and changes:
[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] I was a little disappointed that the preview webinar this morning was little more than a re-run of the same content from a little over a week ago, albeit with some downloadable PowerPoint slides this time. It was at least an opportunity for some more Q&A and a couple of interesting Q’s got A’d.
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] Providing a little light relief after the rather heavy series of posts on multicast events, a colleague recently asked me what Tiburón actually means. So I looked it up. As well as being a town in California, it is also Spanish for shark. I don’t know which derivation inspired the team at CodeGear, but it does raise the possibility that here in Aotearoa we could perhaps be referring to the forthcoming release of Delphi as Mangō, as this is the Maori for “shark”. Some additional trivia – from the little that I have picked up of the Maori language, “nui” in a name implies “big” or “large”, so the place name Mangonui (which crops up in a few places here) means “big shark”.
[Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes] Drawing this subject to a close (finally!), here’s the concluding post I promised, including the fully documented and finished implementation that has been serving me well for almost 2 years. The finished implementation incorporates a number of refinements to the core framework, and those are what we shall briefly look at in this final post.
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[Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes] So far we’ve seen a multicast event implementation in (fairly limited) action, and dissected the core of it’s implementation, which was a fairly dry affair. I also demonstrated a flaw in the initial implementation – a susceptibility to objects adding handlers to events but not removing them when being destroyed. Before the .NET crowd get all smug, we should note that the relationship between an event source and it’s listeners is potentially problematic, in .NET also. Fortunately I devised a solution to the problem in my framework. The solution – rather neatly – was itself provided by a multicast event.
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] At the end of my last post I described a problem that arises if an object adds handlers to an event and is then destroyed without having removed those handlers. This video demonstrates that problem and also shows a solution provided by the multicast events framework itself.
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] My first poll looked ahead to the next version of Delphi, asking what we were looking forward to. It came as no real surprise to find Generics and Unicode leading the pack. So I thought I’d turn the perspective around to look in the opposite direction and find out where our pollsters (pollees?) are coming from, and what version of Delphi got them started. To keep the list down to a just barely manageable number I’ve “rolled up” some of the versions – so apologies if your specific version got mashed up with a neighbour.
