News Page for April 1998

April 22nd, 1998

Three great articles today:

The first is a continuation of Stanislav Holenda's series on sound. Check out Digital Sound in Delphi - Part II.

Next, if you have an adventurous streak in you and want to learn more about how Delphi 3's Packages are organized, take a look at Inside the Delphi 3 Package by Wei Bao.

And lastly, Evan Simpson brings us yet another improved method for managing the startup of your application including multiple instance management, and communication with a previous instance of your application. His article is entitled Controlling Application Startup in Delphi 3.

In answer to the question mentioned below (the April 15th Question), I received a number of good responses:

Michael Van Canneyt writes the following:

"It doesn't display graphics because the MicroSoft richedit component, (around which TRichedit is a Delphi wrapper) it isn't able to do so. It also destroys fields and some other things. Maybe Microsoft has released a renewed component (it resides in riched.dll or riched32.dll in the windows\system32 directory), but I don't think so. In general, the capabilities are limited to the capabilities that the Delphi wrapper offers you: textformatting and paragraph formatting. The Visual Basic development kit has a list in its manual with 'supported RTF codes';  this list gives all the codes that the component doesn't choke on; this doesn't necessarily mean that the component SUPPORTS them, i.e. displays them  correctly. For instance I know for a fact that field codes are accepted (as it says in the list), but are destroyed when the Richedit component saves its text again."

But an actual solution to the problem was offered by Kevin Gallagher. On the DSP site, he found a freeware OLE RichEdit component that looks like it is just the solution we need. You can download it by clicking here. Thanks Kevin!

April 17th, 1998

A bunch of new stuff today...

Chuck Gadd presents an extension to a technique originally presented by Paul Harding. It's called Multiple Lines of Text in a String Grid - Improved!

Daniel Wojcik, like all of us, get tired of manually distributing upgrades to everyone in the company. His solution is presented in Auto Upgrading!

And finally, Stein Svendsen (from Norway, I think) illustrates an interesting extension of a technique originally presented by Alan Lloyd. Check out his work in Piggybacking Event Handlers with Components.

April 15th, 1998

A few things of interest today...

The first is a question that I am going to open up to anyone who might have an answer. This was posed by a reader from the Peoples Republic of China... (yes, Delphi lives there too!). His question relates to RTF files, and I will paraphrase it:

"I created a document using the WordPad application, included a graphic image (bitmap), and saved the file to the RTF format. When I try to load that RTF file into a Delphi TRichEdit component, I get the text but no graphic. How come?".

I didn't have an immediate answer, but it is an interesting question. I do know that RTF format does support graphics... does Delphi not?

Matt Hamilton brings us a great simple tip to improve the user interface when dealing with empty tables. Check out his tip on Using TDataSource to Improve Your User-Interface.

Clinton Johnson is back also with an extension of Graham Marsh's article on Hooks. Take a look at it in Hooking Into the VCL.
 
April 13th, 1998

Sorry for the little break there folks. I was catching up on a number of projects and unfortunately let my attention to UNDU slip a little.

The winners of the UNDU prizes for March are as follows:

For his articles on Windows Hooks, Determining CPU Types, and Compressing 256 color BMPs, Grahame Marsh wins a copy of PSetting by Pythoness Software. For his excellent tip on Moving and Resizing components at Runtime, Matt Hamilton wins a copy of Ray Lischner's book Hidden Paths of Delphi 3. And finally, for his article on Using the Clipboard with WAV files, John Mertus wins a copy of the Delphi Informant Works CD, which includes all issues of Delphi Informant through 1997. Congratulations to you all and thanks again for all the great articles!

I am putting together some good stuff for tomorrow... stay tuned!