Contents
Issue 61, September 2000

• News
  Keep up with all that’s new.

• Streaming Delphi Components
  Jason Southwell shows us how to stream components. The article describes a practical use of the ReadComponent and WriteComponent routines in creating a screen saver generator application.

• Borland Conference 2000
  Bob Swart reports from Borland’s 11th annual conference, held this year in San Diego. What’s new, what’s cool and what might be coming to a computer near you sometime soon!

• Under Construction: Delphi And Strings
  Strings: we use them all the time and know everything there is to know about them, right? Wrong! Bob Swart delves under the hood to explain the various character and string types available in Delphi, how they work and which ones are appropriate to which use.

• Actions And Action Lists
  Actions have been around since Delphi 4, but remain under-used by most developers. Brian Long thinks that’s a shame and in this article sets out to show us clearly what actions and action lists are and how to use them to best effect in your applications. He also explains how to install your own new reusable actions into the Delphi IDE.

• Beating The System: Easy Internet, 2
  Dave Jewell concludes his examination of the WinInet API. Having established the basics, this month he moves on to ftp file downloading.

• Algorithms Alfresco: Caching In On Algorithms
  Julian Bucknall gives us a case study in choosing and implementing algorithms and data structures for a real world project: a file cache for  use in (say) a web browser app. Along the way he covers caching principles, hash tables, priority queues and streams.

• Creating Browser Help Objects
  Eyal Hirsch shows how you can plug your code right inside Internet Explorer to do some pretty neat tricks. All the information you need is here, plus an example to base your own projects on.

• Design By Contract
  Sascha Frick explains what design by contract means, how it improves your development process and how to implement it using Delphi’s support for assertions and invariants.

• One Last Compile
  Reporting for duty

• The Delphi Clinic
  Brian Long with more answers to your queries, including: putting component hints on status bars, how to track actions and the unwanted editor window problem.