Video lessons (tutorials)

Hello all!

If you know English and love Delphi then I am almost sure that you know Nick Hodges (at least his blog). You probably wondering why I am talking about him? The answer is pretty obvious. Nick Hodges is great man which is strongly related to Delphi. Recently this incredibly active man has created 30 videos in 30 days about Delphi. His action inspired Camtasia team to make 30 videos in 30 days about their product - Camtasia Studio. I think that Nick Hodges action should inspire all the professionals in the Delphi community to do the same.

IMHO - video tutorials/lessons is a right direction! Microsoft has chosen this direction and walks on it confidently. Visit www.ASP.net and you will make sure in it. You will find there a lot of fresh video material for beginners and video answer on frequently asked question "How do I ... ?".

I like to watch video from BDS 2006 presentation and found them very useful and informative. I think Borland should spend some time and efforts to make more Delphi videos. It is good to read books, articles ... but it is much better to read some book and then to watch related video made by Delphi professionals.

PS: some video material can be found at Borland Developer Network

Thank you!

Straggle between blogging software giants

Hello all.
Today I want to get back to my previous post about blogging software and blogging services. I have promised that soon I'll announce who has won (IMHO) in this battle for users. As you remember (if you don't you can recollect here) I was talking about 3 competitors: BlogJet, Windows Live Writer and www.writely.com (Google's service). I don't know how I forgot about Microsoft Word 2007 :). Microsoft has added an ability to blog directly from Word. Honestly saying I like it pretty much.
Well, who is the winner? I guess it is Windows Live Writer!!! You will ask why. Because it is FREE, easy to use and convenient. It is a standalone application thus we don't need to go to the web and be tied to the Internet connection speed. In spite of the speed of www.writely.com and my Internet connection I still didn't used to use it as a text processor. Who knows? Maybe sooner or later things will change but for now my decision is Windows Live writer.
But! But one thing has disappointed me. Recently Microsoft released an updated version of Windows Live Writer and said that support of Blogger Beta has been added. That made me excited ... but not for long :(. I have downloaded an updated version, installed it and discovered that it is not completely true. First, I had to get my BlogId number to be able to work with my blog. For me it was not a hard task.

For example JCHeng in his blog post "Blogger Beta Workaround" says that you should navigate in browser to your blog, view source and find blogID string.

That's easy. But you can also do it in other way. Just navigate to your blog and move your cursor to "New Post" link and in the status bar you will see the link url which has your blogID at the end. So you simply copy that link (right click an url and select 'copy' command from the context menu) and then insert it wherever you need and remove everything unnecessary. That's all! Second, I had to change the beginning of the string (url) from "http://www.blogger.com" to "http://beta.blogger.com". Ok, a piece of cake. But all these movement didn't help :(. I continued reciving errors.
Fortunately one of the visitors of JCHeng's blog left a very useful comment. He gave a link to another workaround which fixed an issue. The problem was in the regional settings. If you want Windows Live Writer to work correctly you should change the regional settings to English (United States). Thanks SiD. This method works but it is not acceptable for me. Therefore all I have to do is wait when another new version of Windows Live Writer will be released. Hope it won't take long!

Fresh hotfix for BDS 2006

You probably know about hotfixes 1-6? Well, new hotfixes 7-9 for Borland Developer Studio 2006 has been released and available for download here. Detailed description of the hotfixes can be found here.

Delphi extensions (experts)

Hello world! Probably favorite phrase of most programmers :) Today I want to tell you about a very useful extension for Delphi.

Personally I don't like to use extensions at all. The main reason is "functional overflow". Seems to me that it is hard to find in Internet an experts package containing only necessary functionality which you will use regularly. I don't want to say that all (or almost all) the experts are useless! No! There are a lot of extremely useful experts but they are often not free.

Want proves? Well, no problems!

Visual Forms - is a thumbnail viewer for the forms in your project. Greatly useful and especially for large projects which contain large amount of forms but :( not free. It costs 35 EUROS. Expensive as for me. This expert has only required features and there are no such which will never be used.

GExperts - a very huge Delphi experts package, free but contain some useless features. I am wondering how much time someone should spend before he will be able to use all of them efficiently? I think that a lot. Once again I don't want to say that this package is bad I am just trying to say that user should have a way to install only those experts which he consider useful.

Well, now let's get back to the experts package which I wished to describe to you. It is DDevExtensions Delphi/BCB/BDS IDE plugin. This plugin is free and has only useful features (IMHO). Go and try it! I should say that when I saw it for the first time on the home page I thought that this expert is absolutely useless because the new tool palette layout in BDS is very convenient. But I was wrong. I understood it after I tried DDevExtensions.

have a couple idea concerning creation of experts for Delphi. Hope you will see the realization very soon. Keep in touch!

Building ADO ConnectionString

Last night I was looking for a way of building a ConnectionString for TAdoConnection from Delphi code and having visited section of "Databases" of a Vingrad forum found the solution. It turned out that it could be easily done! All you need to do is just include AdoConEd unit call EditConnectionString function and send TAdoConnection object as a parameter. Further all is simple. A standard window for building a ConnectionString will be shown in which you will do everything as usual.
Thus deploying applications that use ADO connections became much easier!

Code sample:

  if EditConnectionString(DataModule1.adoconPETS) then
  begin
    mmConnString.Text := DataModule1.adoconPETS.ConnectionString;
  end; // if

PS: this post has been written with the help of www.writely.com

Delphi 7 Help for BDS expert

If you use Delphi 2005/2006 and want to use an old Delphi 7 help files (or any other help files) then you need to download updated BDS expert (source code included) 15.4 K. After install you can use 3 different help files by pressing Ctrl-F1, Alt-F1 or Shift-F1.

PS: this post has been written in Microsoft Live Writer.

Blogging software

Hello all!
Before this day I was using BlogJet (BTW, can't wait to see new version 2.0) to post to my blog but recently Microsoft released its Windows Live Writer and I began to doubt which software to use. My doubts became greater after I saw this blog post. In my opinion both programs are great. Each has its own benefits but .. but Windows Live Writer (beta yet) is FREE and I should say that this is a very telling argument. BTW, my previous post was made from Windows Live Writer. I should say that's its functionality is great.
But its not the end! Today Google finally renew the work of its Writely service. Using Writely you can post to your favorite blog too (its not the only and not the main feature of this great service) and it is absolutely FREE (at least for now). So now I am fully confused! But its not for long! Soon, after some research and test, I'll find out which way/software is better to use.

Almost forgot to tell that www.blogger.com is going to update its way of editing posts. Now AJAX technology will be used and I am sure that it would be much more convenient to edit the blog then it is now.

Stay tuned and soon you will know my conclusion about who is the winner.

PS: this post has been written with the help of www.writely.com

New version 1.5 of AdesClrPicker released

Hello all! I hope you remember AdesClrPicker. Yes, yes, yes I am talking about an easy to use, yet powerful color picker application for Web Designers and Web Developers which has been developed by myself.

And now let me tell you a great news. I have released a new version 1.5 of it yesterday. Some new features has been added and some improvements has been made. As always you can download the demo version from the Ades Design site  for free or buy a fully functional version only for $19.90. Please read all details on the site.

Hurry up! Be the first to try an updated version!

Enable Taskbar's auto hide feature from Delphi code

Hi. Recently I was looking for an easy solution on how to enable Taskbar's auto hide and always on top features. The only thing I have found was the solution on how to find out "Is Windows taskbar's auto hide feature enabled?". Here is the solution:

uses ShellAPI;

function IsTaskbarAutoHideOn : boolean;
var
ABData : TAppBarData;
begin
ABData.cbSize := sizeof(ABData) ;
Result :=
(SHAppBarMessage(ABM_GETSTATE, ABData)
and ABS_AUTOHIDE) > 0;
end;

But as you understand this is good but not what I was looking for.
Later I have found something similar to the solution, but once again it was not proper because it was just "cheating" :). Here is it:

procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
var
hTaskbar: THandle;
begin
hTaskbar := FindWindow('Shell_TrayWnd', Nil);
ShowWindow(hTaskbar, SW_HIDE);
end;

procedure TForm1.Button2Click(Sender: TObject);
var
hTaskbar: THandle;
begin
hTaskbar := FindWindow('Shell_TrayWnd', Nil);
ShowWindow(hTaskbar, SW_SHOWNORMAL);
end;

That's why I had to dig deep into the MSDN and write my own solution. So, take a look how I have solved the problem.

procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
var
ABData: TAppBarData;
begin
ABData.cbSize := sizeof(tappbardata);
ABData.hWnd := FindWindow('SHELL_TRAYWND', nil);
ABData.lParam := LParam(ABS_ALWAYSONTOP or ABS_AUTOHIDE);
SHAppBarMessage($0000000a, ABData);
end;

As it turned out, the main problem was to find ABM_SETSTATE constant which equal to $0000000a and not declared in Delphi.
That's it!

Delphi 10 Lite

Great news for those who has slow PC and want to use BDS 2006! There is an Lite version of BDS 2006 in the Internet. Yo can download it from here. The password is "496sgjde7869". For more details read "readme.txt"
I have already downloaded it and making some tests. So far it works fine and fast. Will see what will be next.

ASP.NET

After a long period of silence the first thing that I want to write about is ASP.NET. The reason why I am speaking about it is my diploma theme. It was something like “ASP.NET in Delphi”. In this post I am not going to tell you about how ASP.NET technology is tough, simple and efficient. In this post I want to highlight the first thing that disappointed me in Delphi (actually in an IDE but not in the language).

Well I love Delphi and I like new DBS 2006 IDE very much. But when I started to study ASP.NET and tried to write some plain .aspx files in BDS 2006 I was very, very much disappointed. The visual HTML editor in this IDE is terrible, awful, horrible … Solution was found very fast. I have simply opened an .aspx file in the DreamWeaver and made everything as I wanted. But there are few annoying things on this stage too. Also Code Editor sometimes behaves really strange when I am editing an .aspx file.

The other thing that made me feel sad is that when I was checking the results of my work in Internet Explorer everything appeared wonderful but when I was using Firefox to see the results WebControls where looking not exactly as I wanted them to look. E.g. when I was changing the width of some control to 100 pixels it was shown correctly in IE but in Firefox it was shown with default width. Fortunately the decision of this problem was found. Thanks to Dr.Bob’s post. He explained the reason of the problem and how to solve this problem.

Conclusion:

• ASP.NET – Rulezzz;
  
• Borland (DevCo) should greatly improve it’s solution for ASP.NET;
  

Thank you for your attention and sorry for bad English.

Freedom

Hi all! I know that for a pretty long period of time my blog has not been updated. As you might know or guess I was extremely busy with my graduation project. Finally I have finished it and protected my diploma. Now I am absolutely free and have enough time to write new and interesting (I hope) posts.

AdesClrPicker

I have recently finished one very interesting program which was ordered by Ades. This program is very useful for web designers or any other kind of designers. The main purpose of it is to capture colors anywhere on the screen and store them in either HTML or RGB color codes. You can read more detailed description, see more screenshots and download the demo from here.
I will be tremendously appreciated for those who will leave any suggestions, critics etc. here in the comments.

PS: very soon new version will be released so stay tuned!

Very busy

Hello everyone! Sorry that I didn’t wrote any post during such a long period! The reason is that I have found a job and trying to pass probation period. Therefore I am busy almost all the day and when I am coming back home at the evening I am trying to rest. I have only one weekend in the week . That’s horrible! Also, I need to write my graduation paper. So, I am very, very busy! But I promise that very soon the situation will change to the best side!!! The reasons are:

• I think I’ll left this job very soon because I don’t like it;
• I’ll write my graduation paper and will try to find a much better(I mean more interesting) job than I have found recently;
• I have finished one very useful project and I am going to tell how realized some parts of it.

 And also I’ll share some very interesting links with you. See you soon!

UI

Today I have found a very interesting link http://www.activewin.com/reviews/previews/office12/. I have read about new features of the MS Office 12 and have seen some screen shots before. But this article contain more screen shots than I have seen before. I am looking at those screen shots and thinking: “It would be incredibly GREAT if all programmers were trying to make such a brilliant and fancy UI in there own programs like MS do! Eh…”