[Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes] Answer: When it is merely the container for an interface. After a long series of observation and opinion pieces, I thought it about time I posted something a little more technical, so here we go.
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] The usually exhaustively complete Raymond Chen over-looked a crucial factor in his most recent posting on his excellent Old New Thing Blog regarding SHAutoComplete. In his post he discusses a technique for disabling auto-complete in a common dialog, but along the way discusses why calling SHAutoComplete twice cannot be used to remove flags previously applied. As I say, Raymond normally is very precise and exhaustive in his coverage, often pre-empting “nit pickers” by calling out in advance anything and everything wrong with a question or with approaches that are implied in the question (or in his answer). In this case, I would have expected him to draw particular attention to the warning in the MSDN docs for SHAutoComplete: “SHAutoComplete should not be called more than once with the same HWND. Doing so results in a memory leak.” But far from it – he actually advocates calling SHAutoComplete a second time to modify flags if needed! Sadly, comments are currently disabled on The Old New Thing due to an extraordinarily lengthy upgrade process being carried out on the underlying blogging system, so I was unable to draw attention to this (and no doubt earn myself a Nit Picker “badge” in the process), but in this case I think it’s worth Read More…
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] OK, so perhaps not exactly what they said but they have said that C# (as well as C and PHP) are not to be taught as part of A-Level Computer Science any more, and they have recommended using Pascal/Delphi (from a list of other languages including Java, Python and VisualBASIC). Full details available here, courtesy of The Register.
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] Another commercial Delphi component vendor has apparently decided to pursue a direction that no longer involves supporting at least some of their Delphi components on a commercial basis. Fortunately in this case they have decided to open source their products. So, if you are using the Luxena DBExpress drivers for Informix, these and related supporting code can now be obtained from the Google Code links, below.
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] Prompted by a recent question/survey thread on the NZ DUG mailing list, I’ve posted a new poll (see panel, left) seeking to gain a picture of the working day of Delphi software development professionals. The nature of the questions mean it’s an unavoidably wordy poll, but I’ve tried to keep it as manageable as possible whilst also providing some useful insight into what we are doing and with what tools. I’ve already completed the poll with my answers reflecting my working day here at Flow. The results could be interesting and the more people contribute the more useful it will be, so tell all your Delphi friends. 🙂
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] Cameron Hart at Flow Software has just blogged about a change he identified in MIDAS.DLL to significantly improve the performance (and capacity) of client data sets when handling large volumes of records and BLOB fields. Basically he seems to have taken the work previously done by Andreas Hausladen and applied it to BLOB’s.
[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] Thanks to commenters I have already learned two useful things as a result of yesterday’s post, both things which I cannot fathom how I did not already know. But here’s something I learned for myself as a result of a comment made by Malcolm Groves at the Auckland Delphi 2010 launch day recently.
[Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes] Perhaps apart from attributes and the significant changes in the area of RTTI in Delphi 2010, there really isn’t much in the way of “HEADLINE NEWS” in this release. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t lots to appreciate, some of it dangerously subtle.
[Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes] I casually suggested the use of the “absolute” keyword in response to a question on the NZ DUG mailing list today. I thought nothing of it but someone mentioned that it had been years since he’d seen anyone use it, so I thought maybe it was worth bringing to wider attention.
[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] A commenter on my blog suggested that Cross Platform could be a big win for Delphi, making it “the first” to achieve this. This I think says a lot about the awareness and expectation of (some) of the people asking for cross platform, because far from being first Delphi would be way behind the curve in this area.
