Monday 15th October.

The theme of this meeting was Delphi IDE extensions.
We had several short presentations:
Geoffrey Smith on Project Magician
John McDonald on Documentation Insight
Peter Magor on GExperts
Tony Bryer on MMX Code Explorer

Geoffrey showed how Project Magician can clean up .dproj files and keep them in a more consistent order. This makes it easier to view changes to project files in version control systems, and makes comparing .dproj files from different projects simpler. Project Magician has a few options, such as whether to keep or remove information for unused platforms.
Project Magician is a free plug-in from Uwe Raabe.

John started by showing Delphi’s XML Documentation Comments.
This allows classes, fields, methods, properties, enumerated types, and other declarations to be documented in source code with comments that use an XML format. These comments are then displayed by the IDE when you hover over an identifier or use class completion.
The comments can be collapsed when viewing the source.
This is all documented in the help files under “XML Documentation Comments” or at http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Tokyo/en/XML_Documentation_Comments

He then showed how Documentation Insight simplifies creating these XML Documentation Comments, and how it allows you to create Help Files from the comments in either html, chm, Microsoft Help V2 or Help & Manual format.
It generally worked quite well, though it didn’t seem to handle multi-line comments particularly well, occasionally had problems with synchronisation between the IDE and Documentation Inspector, and is rather expensive unless you are using it extensively.

Peter showed us how he uses GExperts.
The User Clause Wizard helped adding items to the uses clause of a unit.
The Rename feature is similar to the Rename refactoring in recent Delphi versions.
Replace Components simplified replacing multiple occurences of one component type with another.
Components to Code generated the code to move the creation and initialization of a component from a form to code.
He also showed the GExperts Class Browser, the Message Dialog Wizard, a feature to reverse the direction of multiple assignment statements, and a source backup wizard.

GExperts is an Open Source project from Erik Berry and the GExperts Development Team.
The latest version can be downloaded from https://blog.dummzeuch.de/experimental-gexperts-version/
Documentation is at https://blog.dummzeuch.de/gexperts-documentation/
The Google+ Community is at https://plus.google.com/communities/112747591344358749692

Tony showed us MMX Code Explorer, which was formerly ModelMaker Code Explorer.
He showed us some of the refactoring tools available, a wizard to add properties to a class, and the excellent Class Explorer. There is some overlap in the functionality of MMX Code Explorer and GExperts.
MMX Code Explorer is now a free IDE plug-in.

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