These notes by
Glenn Lawrence © 1997Announcements - Q&A Session - AGM - Presentation: "Drag and drop" - The Draw - Close
 | Graham Bashford (A.P.C.S.) |
| Grahame Pitson |
| Brendan Watson (RMIT Innovation) |
| Phillip McLennan (Dept. of Human Services) |
| Mick Bowden (Fortis Business Systems) |
| Greg McAdam (Fortis Business Systems) |
| Tuan-Loc Nguyen |
Borland Free seminar:
1st September at the Sofitel - brochures were handed out
Web site
The name adug.org.au has been approved and the server is up
and running. We are just waiting for content to be copied over
now.
Member survey questionnaires:
Thanks to all who returned their questionnaires on or before
the meeting. The information will be used to create a database
for all members to access. Those who forgot to bring their
questionnaires, but still entered in the draw for Delphi 3 are
reminded to get them in to me as soon as they can.
| Borland kindly provided the Delphi 3 for the questionnaire draw as well as a number of tee-shirts and object hierarchy posters to give away. Thanks Borland! |
| Leon Shapiro organised for a number of free passes to PC-IT in September. Thanks Leon! |
David Skilnyk hosted the Q&A session and as usual it generated a lot of discussion and information. Here are just a few points that I managed to note down. Sorry for any inaccuracies/omissions.
Bai Ming asked about report writers and had some concerns about Quick Reports. David suggested that QR1 was better than QR2 and that QR1 was now available for Delphi 3. Graham Bashford recommended Ace Reporter and David also suggested Report Printer Pro as a colleague is using it and finds it very good, although it is less visual and you have to write code to make it work.
Sylvester Pereira asked about stored procedures and how you would use them. David's reply was too long for me to note but I think the gist was that they allow you to select from a number of back end database procedures that return a dataset.
Paul Fraser asked how to recursively search directories using FindNext. The suggested solution was to make sure you set the appropriate flags in the TSearchRec.
David said something about Borland not recommending the old Pascal file i/o stuff and that you should use the standard windows API calls instead.
Tuan-Loc Nguyen asked about how you would make a Paradox database read only. The problem being that you can't just make the folder read only as Paradox needs to create a lock file there. Mark Brooks related some information he read from Borland about having Paradox DBs on CD-Roms. The solution in this case seems to be to manually create a lock file and leave it there. Another possible idea was to leave the folder as writable but to set only the files read only. David suggested that you might be able to get the lock file created elsewhere, but wasn't sure of the details.
Paul Fraser related some problems he was having with TMemoryStream. There appear to be problems with increasing the size. Sometimes the underlying data appears to not be copied into the newly created block.
David Skilnyk asked if anyone knew how to create a parser and explained that he was working on a parser for RTF files.
Graham Bashford related that he had found the solution to his DLL problem from last month. It seems that you need to include the Forms unit in the uses clause. It looks like there are things in Forms that are needed even if you don't explicitly use any symbols from that unit in your own code.
Somebody asked whether anyone had any experience with Advantage Server. People had heard of it, but no direct experience.
David Skilnyk related his experience with SQL Anywhere and advised that it was pretty fast and he would "almost recommend it before Interbase".
Somebody asked about a problem they were having with Delphi 1 requiring DIVBX11.DLL which appeared to be missing in one PC even though it didn't even appear to be needed on another PC. Mark Weston suggested copying the DIVBX11.DLL from the Delphi 1 installation CD-ROM.
The ADUG President Leon Shapiro called the AGM to order and the business of the AGM was transacted smoothly.
For full details please see the official AGM minutes which were taken by Don Macrae.
The proposed amendment to allow e-mail to be used for official communication was carried.
Leon Shapiro, David Skilnyk and Peter Viola stood down as President, Vice President and Secretary respectively and those offices were filled by yours truly (Glenn Lawrence), Keith Latham and Paul Spain respectively. Leon also graciously stepped down from the committee to allow Graham Bashford to take a place. New members to the committee were therefore Paul Spain and Graham Bashford. Welcome to the team guys!
Thanks to Leon for chairing the AGM, and also for his efforts in establishing the group and for organising the transfer of funds from the Paradox User Group. I would also like to offer my personal thanks for nominating me as his successor. I hope I can meet his and everyone's expectations.
Paul Spain of the Bionic Ear Institute is an experienced programmer whose background is in technical software development. Until a year ago he was working mainly in C/C++ but has been a full on Delphi programmer since.
Paul's presentation was on how to do drag and drop in Delphi and covered dropping of files from explorer onto a Delphi app (either inactive, active or minimised) as well as drag and drop between controls in the same app.
Paul gave a very professional powerpoint presentation and example code that he had prepared. There were a few gremlins with the data show, and the absence of a mouse made drag and drop demonstrations a bit difficult but Paul succeeded in enlightening us nevertheless. The "thank-you" tee-shirt was well earned. Many thanks Paul.
The draw for a copy of Delphi 3 Professional was won by Sylvester Pereira. Congratulations Sylvester, I hope we can look forward to a demo of some D3 features in the near future! Consolation tee-shirts were won by Greg McAdam and Steve Moller.
The meeting closed (late again - sigh!) at 8:45pm and the new committee met immediately afterwards.
Committee meeting minutes are available to ADUG members from the ADUG secretary.