These notes by Glenn Lawrence © 1997

As usual the Q&A session generated a lot of discussion and information. Here are a few points that I managed to note down.

Paul Fraser noted that he was having problems with his Cirrus videocard under NT4. Davyd Norris advised that Cirrus are notorious forbeing slow with providing updated drivers and suggested keepingan eye on their web site.

Somebody asked about copying paradox databases and Paul Spain advised that there is a third party tool that you can get that will recreate indexes etc, so that you only need to copy the .DB files.

Craig Van Nieuwkerk said that his employer wanted to move away from Paradox and asked about alternatives. This ultimately led to discussion about the "Direct Access" product that facilitates connection with Microsoft JET (and this Access) and is being used by Mark Weston Mark gave some good advice about this product and I later asked him to clarify what he said about how it works. He says:

"DirectAccess (from Opus in Switzerland - www.opus.ch) makes a small change in BDE.DCU. It replaces the string "IDAPI32.DLL" with "ODAPI32.DLL". IDAPI32.DLL is the top layer of the BDE and handles the BDE API calls made by Delphi applications. ODAPI32.DLL is supplied by Opus and has exactly the same interface as IDAPI32.DLL. ODAPI32.DLL takes the BDE API calls and translates them to DAO method calls."

Peter Szymiczek advised that a beta version for Delphi 3 is available. Mark tells me that it is at http://www.opus.ch/ODA/Download30B1.htm

Grant Dunoon expressed some concern that there appear to be some restrictions on the use of OLE Enterprise with D3 (or at least Ivory). Mark Weston advised that you don't need OLE Enterprise to do OLE Automation across a network. DCOM (which ships with NT4 and is available as a free addition to Win95) works just fine. However, DCOM has limitations (scalability, robustness) that OLE Enterprise and other components in MIDAS are designed to overcome.

 Presentation - "Team Development Support Tools"

Steve Forbes of OzmoSys has been a developer for many years and has been working with Delphi since the very first beta releases in '94. He is now working on a large cash management system for a major financial institution and has lots of experience using Delphi in a team environment.

Steve gave a gave a quick overview of the Open Tools API that you use when writing "experts" for Delphi and gave a demonstration of creating a simple expert and installing it into the Delphi IDE.

He discussed the pros and cons of DLLs versus linking into the DCL file (the file where the VCL and your added controls reside) and favoured the DLL approach, which he demonstrated.

Steve then discussed the value of a version control system and gave a demo of an expert that he is writing for Burton System Software that provides a user friendly interface to their "TLIB" version control system.

He also gave a demo of a very simple, but extremely useful stand alone tool he has written to allow you to quickly change between versions of DCL files. The tool is called the Delphi Library Configuration Manager (DLCM) and is invaluable when working in a team environment where you may need to swap between local and baseline versions of the DCL. Steve has kindly provided a copy of DLCM and it is available on our web site.

Steve's presentation was very valuable, and even more so with the excellent notes that he prepared and handed out. A copy of the notes can also be found on the web site for those who missed out.

Davyd Norris of Franklin Collins is a very experienced developer who used to work for the original "Creative Systems" and wrote the talking parrot app in Pascal for their CMS card. Creative Systems are now "Creative Technologies" of SoundBlaster fame. He is a Borland enthusiast from way back.

Dave is now also an OO advocate and gives courses in OO process (as well as Delphi) at Franklin Collins here in Melbourne.

Dave opened his talk with a discussion of the iterative software process model and showed how the Object Browser fits onto the implementation phase of the process.

As an example he compiled up the Resource Explorer (RESXPLOR.DPR) that comes with Delphi 2. In passing he also showed how you can use the resource explorer to extract useful resources like the Microsoft toolbar bitmaps from EXE files.

He pointed out that the Object Browser works on compiled projects only, and only shows those objects that have been compiled into the project. So you can't use it to browse the whole VCL hierarchy (unless your project includes the whole VCL).

He also advised that you need to turn on all debugging information in order to use the "References" feature. Especially the "Symbol info" check box in the Options->Compiler page of the IDE which is by default switched off. After setting these options you then need to do a complete rebuild - ignoring the warnings that appear due to the options being now set.

I asked if it would be a good idea to re-compile the Borland VCL with debug info. Davyd advised that in order to properly browse the VCL it would be a good idea, but that the DCL file would grow very large and could slow down linking. Looks like another job for Steve Forbes' handy DLCM tool!

Dave then gave a very thorough walkthrough of all the features of the object browser as well as a good part of the VCL object hierarchy.

He then gave a quick overview of the Snorkel product from Object Domain which is like a super-duper Object Browser and looks very useful. You can get a beta copy from www.object-domain.com

Finally Dave introduced us to Object-Domain's OO case and reverse engineering tool for Delphi, which at around $US100 is a very cost effective way of creating and keeping track of your object model. It's also available at www.object-domain.com

Dave's presentation ranged over a large number of issues (much more than just the Object Browser) but as everything was so valuable nobody really minded.

Many thanks to both Davyd and Steve for their very informative and professional presentations.

The meeting closed (late again) at around 8:45 and was followed by the usual committee meeting. Committee meeting minutes are available to ADUG members from the ADUG Secretary.