Contents
Issue 45, May 1999

• News
  More updates from the world of Delphi development.

• Internet Cookies
  Cookies are a good way of saving state in your web applications and Bob Swart shows how easy they are to implement, without any expensive add-on packs or Delphi's Client/Server version.

• Beating The System: Fun With Bitmaps
  Dave Jewell has been twiddling pixels: he shows how to manipulate bitmaps at the pixel level to create a variety of effects in double quick time, using the ScanLine property of Delphi’s TCanvas class. Brightness changes, flipping and Gaussian blurs are amongst the facilities offered by our maestro.

• DCOM Deployment Secrets
  Roy Nelson describes some common issues faced by developers in the deployment of DCOM applications, helping us avoid the usual pitfalls!

• Algorithms Alfresco: Cherchez La Femme
  Julian Bucknall takes the lid off Lempel and Ziv’s LZ77 compression algorithm, saying hello to messrs Shannon, and Fano along the way, plus the PKZip Deflate method. The patent minefield introduced courtesy of Unisys is also outlined. Julian neatly sidesteps all these problems by creating our very own Algorithms Alfresco variant of LZ77, which is of course better!

• Under Construction: Delphi 4 And Java, Part 2
  Bob Swart and Hubert Klein use CORBA to enable communication between Delphi and Java applications.

• Is Delphi Running?
  Often you want code to behave differently at design-time and runtime, or find out if Delphi is installed, running or launched your application. Brian Long explains all the tricks you need to know, covering all versions of Delphi.

• Getting The Message
  David Baer looks into the mysteries of Windows messaging and how it interacts with Delphi, presenting a very useful component which can be used to eavesdrop on Delphi internal message flows in a far more intimate way than external spy tools like WinSight32.

• One Last Compile...
  Life, the universe and components.

• COM Corner: Microsoft Transaction Server, Part 1
  The COM-based MTS technology has been generating much interest lately and this month Steve Teixeira explains how it’s really about much more than transactions.

• Debugging Web Applications
  Brandon Smith reports some useful techniques for debugging ISAPI, ASP and similar web applications. His recent review of web app development tools for Delphi is on this month’s disk too!

• The Delphi Clinic
  Brian Long with more answers to your queries, including GUIDs, CORBA and Dial-Up Networking.