Monday 15th August

Helper Classes – John McDonald

John discussed the benefits and limitations of Delphi helper classes and showed a few examples, including:
a simple class helper that added Position, Size and ClientSize properties to all Controls,
the Delphi supplied record helpers for the primitive types Integer, Double and string,
a simple record helper for a type defined as type Temperature = type Double,
and the DateTimeHelper written by Colin Johnsun available from https://github.com/colinj

Virtual Machines – Andrea Coffey from Miss Programs

Andrea led a discussion on virtual machines.
She focussed mainly on Virtual Box and VMWare fusion and described features of each and some traps to avoid.

A Compact XML Reader – Andrew Tweddle

Andrew showed us some of his techniques for parsing XML files.
He used these techniques to reverse engineer files with no documentation and which don’t adhere to XML standards.