Monday 19th March.

Brian Watson, Geoffrey Smith and Andrea Coffey shared some tips and tricks with Delphi and the IDE.

Brian showed some short videos by Alister Christie at learndelphi.tv.

The videos included:
Movie 129 – $(ProductVersion) Environment Variable
Movie 127 – The New Dark IDE Theme in Tokyo
and extracts from
Movie 125 – IDE Tips And Coding Shortcuts

Brian then tried the techniques described on his laptop and we discussed and experimented with variations on the techniques.

Geoffrey showed some techniques he has discovered recently including:
a type safe version of FreeAndNil, that works with objects but gives a compile error if you try to use it with interfaces or records (instead of weird run time errors).
A couple of tips he mentioned after the meeting:
Select a block of text, then press Ctrl-Shift-J to get into Sync Edit mode. This allows you to simultaneously change all occurrences of any identifier within the selection.
Change the parameters of a method in either the interface or implementation section, then press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-P to synchronize the changes to the other section.

Andrea shared some tips for running Delphi on a Mac.
She uses key mappings in VMWare Fusion to change the behaviour of several keys.

The meeting was held at the Melbourne Men’s Shed, situated in the Federation Square Car Park building, off Russell St Extension.