December: In the 10 minute tute Andy Bulka demonstrated the “Data Diagram View” in the Delphi 5 IDE and suggested alternative uses. The main presentation was by Peter Hinrichsen of Techinsite who gave us the low down on his open source object oriented persistence mechanism. Thanks guys.
November: This meeting started with a sneak preview of new features in Kylix and Delphi 6 by Borland’s John Kaster. Well, alright it was a video of John from the recent BorCon Asia Pacific conference.
Following John we had well known and much loved ADUG member Glenn Crouch of ESB Consultancy who gave a very informative and well received presentation entitled “Automating the Installation of Design Time Packages”. Glenn has been working on this process to automate the installation of his own ESBPCS component suite. The information was of interest even for those who don’t plan to publish their components as the techniques presented could also be used to automate the building of applications.
Glenn’s Powerpoint presentation can be downloaded from here, and Glenn has promised to make the relevant sections of source code available here soon. Many thanks Glenn.
Glenn came all the way from Kalgoorlie WA to make this presentation. Well alright, he was on his way back from BorCon anyway.
October: ADUG president Glenn Lawrence gave a test run of his upcoming Borcon 2000 presentation “Dead Easy Web Development with CGI Expert”. Glenn is the founder of AIMTec, a local company who among other things offers Delphi-aware Web hosting solutions.
September: Pierre Semaan of PEG Technologies came down from Sydney to give us a valuable sneak preview of his Borcon 2000 presentation on SOAP and XML. Thanks Pierre.
August Com Automation Clients with Delphi 5:
Presentation from Brian Watson of Desktop EDA. The presentation was announced on this site as follows:
Desktop EDA has had a product in the field for a year which was an OLE Client developed using the
OLE Automation tools in Delphi 3. A 2000 version of the server application rendered the Desktop EDA application unreliable due to not well understood demand on resources. Rewriting the application using the Delphi 5 COM features has resulted in a usable product with more features, faster execution and better control.
Brian is an ADUG member, and this was his first use of COM. This means the material will be accessible to any of us who are new or relative beginners with COM. Plus of course experienced COM users should come to contribute to the discussion.
The presentation was followed by a useful discussion on COM issues, from basic to more advanced.
July: Client DataSet Support using Microsoft Remote Data Service (RDS). This was the title of the presentation by Mark Weston, member and Principal of Real Solutions. Follow this link to the PowerPoint presentation. Ten minute tute was from Bryan Dayton on Console Applications.
June: How long is a piece of string. This was the title of Michael Stringer’s presentation on Project Metrics. Based upon significant personal experience of delivering software projects on time and on budget for commercial clients, Michael presented the evidence and the principles to follow. The essential principle is that you must maintain your project metrics, meaning some measure of your productivity. This means having a basis for measuring output, whether it be use cases, function points, forms or lines of code, and then making sure that all projects are measured in terms of the output unit and resources consumed, so that they can deliver updates to the productivity index. Of course, an estimate cannot be given until you have an estimate of the size of the task in terms of a relevant unit, eg use cases.
The ten minute tute was delivered by Grahame Grieve, on the subject of herding cats, sorry, make that managing programmers. This was based upon a book “Managing Technical People” by Watts S. Humphrey, the originator of PSP, the Personal Software Process. This book was an eye opener for Grahame, and Grahame’s thoughts on the subject were well received.
May: The main presentation was from Glenn Stephens, fresh from presenting at the Autumn Symposium the previous Friday. His subject: “State and its Natural Enemy: HTTP”. You ring for a taxi to take you to the airport. You leave it at the airport and hop on your commuter plane. Upon your return, there the taxi is, where you left it. No? This story was actually from Malcolm Groves, but it got a mention in Glenn’s presentation. Ten minute tute was replaced by a sort, performed on the assembled company by Peter Hinrichsen, with the aid of a rubber ball.
April: The main item this month was a talk by Darius Zakrzewski entitled “The Pattern Movement: A New Culture”. Darius is the founder of the Melbourne Patterns Group and Conference Chair for the first Australian Patterns conference. He is also the lead of the architectural board responsible for setting and overseeing software directions at Cybergraphic Systems, a Melbourne company with some 140 in-house developers. Darius’s talk was something of a commercial for the patterns approach, suggesting that patterns were a way to transform software development such that mature, sophisticated and proven techniques for solving design problems became communicable and learnable, to coin a word. The talk was well received, and subsequent discussion revealed that it was a useful contribution to many. At present we do not have a copy of Darius’s paper, but we will post it when we do.
Instead of a ten minute tute the main item was preceded by a reading of a dramatization of the Visitor pattern. Follow this link to read the script.
March: The topic this month was Delphi’s ‘Open Tools API’. Part I was a comprehensive introductory coverage by Paul Spain, which included a refresher on interfaces, a feature of the Open Tools API since D4, and ended with a demonstration ‘Hello World’ expert. Part II was delivered by Paul Gilbert, and consisted of a demonstration and explanation of two experts. Altogether the two Pauls were effective in giving us access to the insides of the IDE we work in every day. Follow this link for presentation material and this link for the demos.
February: This month we were treated to an excellent “Ten Minute Tute” on “Object tracking” by ADUG member Ian Krigsman, followed by an enthusically received key note presentation by Graham Grieve of Kestral Computing on the subject of Web Development – benefits and pitfalls. Many thanks guys.
January: The theme of our first meeting for the new year was “Version Control”. Grahame Grieve from Kestral Computing presented an enlightening talk on version control practices used at Kestral and demonstrated a custom made version control system that they use. Paul Spain then presented a first class demo of the open-source version control system CVS. Follow this link for Paul’s presentation.