These notes by Glenn Lawrence © 1997

The evening kicked off with the usual Q&A session, which as usual was very lively.

Peter Viola then gave a brief summary of his findings from Borland's C++ Builder release demo he attended earlier in the day.

Peter Szymiczek then presented a summary of last month's Microsoft Developers Conference. Peter said that "developers" conference was stretching it a bit as it was more sales pitch than technical discussion, but nevertheless there were some insights to be gleaned about where Microsoft see the market heading and the new developments they plan to introduce. Internet, ActiveX and NT 5 figured highly.

Peter illustrated his talk with a first class Powerpoint presentation, courtesy of Microsoft, and prepared some excellent handouts. A copy can be found in the library. Many thanks Peter!

Don MacRae then introduced a case study of Lance Collins' requirement to port a payroll system from DOS Powerflex to Delphi. Lance presented the problem and this stimulated a lot of interesting discussion in the group. No firm recommendations were made but issues raised included the pros and cons of centralising data access and the business rules and how that could be done, as well as the benefits of using DLLs to provide common services as opposed to the simpler approach of just using Delphi units. Many thanks to Lance for preparing the material, and to Don for the case study idea.

The meeting closed at around 8:15 and was followed by the usual committee meeting. Committee meeting minutes are available to ADUG members from the ADUG Secretary.