Perth Meeting – August

The Perth chapters of the Australian Delphi User Group are meeting this Tuesday 18th August,

New faces are welcome
Two presentations plus a bonus third presentation from last month when we ran out of time.
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Artifactory, 8/16 Guthrie St.  Osborne Park, WA
6:00 pm – casual catch up
6:15 pm – first presentation
    <Sometimes Later After The Pizza Runs Out> –
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AGENDA
* David Millington – Parnassus IDE extensions
* Lex Edmonds – Adventures in the world of form scaling and 4K displays
* Scott Hollows – Working with ZIP, RAR and PDF files and Top Secret Toolbox

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PRESENTATION 1) David Millington.  Parnassus IDE extensions and building your own
Ive been using the Parnassus IDE add-ons this month and was impressed with the code mini-map bookmark replacement.  So I tracked down David Millington from Parnassus and asked him to demonstrate the IDE add-ons to the Perth group.
David will also take us behind the scenes to show us how to build our own IDE extensions
Abstract
The Delphi IDE, like all, is not perfect.  Luckily, you can extend it by writing plugins – ‘wizards’ in its parlance – to change or add features, and that’s exactly what David has spent the past year doing.  The talk will cover Bookmarks and Navigator, two publicly available plugins, the first of which replaces the IDE’s inbuilt bookmark functionality, and the second of which focuses on code navigation: quickly jumping around a unit and finding items of interest, and provides a minimap.  Then, there will be a look at the code: what’s involved in writing a plugin, how to draw on the IDE’s editor window, and time permitting, a brief introduction to DelphiAST, an open source Delphi syntax parser by Roman Yankovsky used in Navigator.

Bio:
David Millington is an Australian developer, currently living in Europe. As a teenager he used Turbo Pascal and Delphi, which was the start of a career in computer science. After graduating in 2004 from the University of Tasmania, he worked for a marine science company developing sonar visualisation and processing software.  Although mostly professionally working in C++, he stayed using Delphi for hobby programming.  In 2014, then living in Estonia, he started Parnassus, a Delphi and C++ Builder consulting company, and at the same time as a side project began writing plugins for Delphi.  The first free plugin, Parnassus Bookmarks, was released in October 2014, followed by the commercial Navigator plugin in June 2015.  He also maintains a few open source projects, including TFireMonkeyContainer, a VCL control for embedding FMX forms inside VCL forms.  He is currently based in Köln, Germany.
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PRESENTATION 2) Lex Edmonds’ Adventures in the world of form scaling and 4K displays
Lex will show us issues related to large monitors and ultra-high resolutions including system oddities like multi-monitor DPI scaling and DPI virtualization
Lex has over 30 years working in the Information Technology industry, including:
 • 14 years working for an international company based in Perth, on Australian and international Automated Fare Collection (AFC) projects, as Software Engineer, Team Leader, Technical Specialist, Technical Writer, Business Analyst and Systems Analyst. Highlights were projects in Beijing, Seattle, Cape Town, UK and Thailand.
 • 16 years working for a small vertical market software house in Perth, as an Analyst/Programmer and Team Leader.
 • 15 years working freelance part-time producing MS Windows software applications, user manuals, tutorials and e-books.
 Lex is currently the lead software developer for Microtax Pty Ltd, producing tax preparation software for tax and BAS agents.
 Lex has been working with Delphi since 1997.
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PRESENTATION 3) Scott Hollows
* Working with ZIP, RAR and PDF files
* Scott’s Top Secret Toolbox – software that I use every day to improve developer productivity