News Page

May 25, 1998
 
A bunch of great stuff today...

First, we have a quick tip by Jorge Turiel on making multi-line hints in Delphi.

Next, an interesting discussion by Clinton Johnson on the failings of TImageList. I haven't yet confirmed some of the details, but it is a very interesting read. He calls the article: Here Thar be Dragons!

Next, Lanny Grim encountered a number of problems dealing with conversions of DateTime values from Delphi 1 and Delphi 3 (they store them a litttle differently). His solution was a Universal Date/Time class that makes the conversions a snap.

And finally, Angus Johnson presents an in-depth discussion of disk space and cluster usage in FAT32. A very interesting article... Check it out in Getting to the Bottom of FAT32...

May 11, 1998

A little bit of catch up work...

First, as most of you are probably aware, Borland has changed its name to Inprise Corporation. It seems primarily intended to show their focus on distributed object computing. What this means for Delphi is still unclear however. It may be just a simple name change, but who knows. If you want to learn more, you can check out their renamed web site at http://www.inprise.com (formerly http://www.borland.com).

This month, I will again be giving out several prizes for randomly selected contributors from last months UNDU articles. The winners are as follows:

For his article on Controlling Application Startup in Delphi 3, Evan Simpson wins a copy of Wise Installation System Version 6.0 - Enterprise Edition.

Wei Bao (Inside the Delphi 3 Package) and Michael Van Canneyt (Explanation of Graphics in RichEdit) both win a copy of Pythoness Software's PSetting system. PSetting is a great set of tools that makes it easy to let your application maintain settings, window positions, preferences, MRU lists, and much more.

And finally, Stanislav Holenda (Digital Sound Part II), Clinton Johnson (Hooking into the VCL), and Matt Hamilton (Using TDataSource to Improve Your User-Interface) all win copies of Swirl Development's PowerSetup 98.

And now on to new things!

As many of you have learned by now, Delphi Packages are, at their core, really just dynamic link libraries (DLL's). Alexander Mehlhorn brings us an interesting discussion about Dynamically Loading Packages at Runtime.

Roberto Gerola- rogerola@tin.it presents a number of interesting components primarily for Delphi 1. First, there is a component called TIDSFormAsst which allows you to have a background image (centered, stretched or tiled) on your form. Next, is a component called HorzList which allows you to have a horizontal scroll bar on a TListBox component. Then, a few database components... DBScroll which is a scrollbar navigator that allows you to rapidly move through records in a table and finally, NQuery and NTable which allow you to easily reference the record number of a TQuery or TTable (for Paradox and dBase files).

And lastly, I have made a number of updates to the Users Group Page. Please feel free to email me if you have changes or additions you would like to make!

In order to keep the size of the News Page to a minimum, I will be archiving previous months and listing them at the bottom.
News Page for April, 1998
News Page for March, 1998
News Page for February, 1998