Answer: When it is merely the container for an interface.
After a long series of observation and opinion pieces, I thought it about time I posted something a little more technical, so here we go.
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Simon Kissel – of CrossKylix fame and Alternative Roadmap infamy – apparently recently re-appeared in the Delphi forums. I say apparently because Embarcadero or TeamB have seemingly been doing their best to maintain his status as a non-person. Can this be A Good Thing™?
I don’t think so.
I hadn’t posted on this news before as I expected there to be a veritable deluge of opinion flooding the Delphi blog-o-sphere and didn’t see any point adding to that noise, but there has been a curious silence on the matter, so here is my two-penneth after all.
Today is a special day indeed, marking as it does my first contribution to the blog of the product I work on, announcing a technical overview of the forthcoming new version of Flow, the middleware, EDI and integration solution developed using Delphi by us at Flow Software, here in New Zealand.
The usually exhaustively complete Raymond Chen over-looked a crucial factor in his most recent posting on his excellent Old New Thing Blog regarding SHAutoComplete.
In his post he discusses a technique for disabling auto-complete in a common dialog, but along the way discusses why calling SHAutoComplete twice cannot be used to remove flags previously applied. As I say, Raymond normally is very precise and exhaustive in his coverage, often pre-empting “nit pickers” by calling out in advance anything and everything wrong with a question or with approaches that are implied in the question (or in his answer).
In this case, I would have expected him to draw particular attention to the warning in the MSDN docs for SHAutoComplete:
“SHAutoComplete should not be called more than once with the same HWND. Doing so results in a memory leak.”
But far from it – he actually advocates calling SHAutoComplete a second time to modify flags if needed!
Sadly, comments are currently disabled on The Old New Thing due to an extraordinarily lengthy upgrade process being carried out on the underlying blogging system, so I was unable to draw attention to this (and no doubt earn myself a Nit Picker “badge” in the process), but in this case I think it’s worth highlighting.
OK, so perhaps not exactly what they said but they have said that C# (as well as C and PHP) are not to be taught as part of A-Level Computer Science any more, and they have recommended using Pascal/Delphi (from a list of other languages including Java, Python and VisualBASIC).
Another commercial Delphi component vendor has apparently decided to pursue a direction that no longer involves supporting at least some of their Delphi components on a commercial basis. Fortunately in this case they have decided to open source their products. So, if you are using the Luxena DBExpress drivers for Informix, these and related supporting code can now be obtained from the Google Code links, below.
Prompted by a recent question/survey thread on the NZ DUG mailing list, I’ve posted a new poll (see panel, left) seeking to gain a picture of the working day of Delphi software development professionals. The nature of the questions mean it’s an unavoidably wordy poll, but I’ve tried to keep it as manageable as possible whilst also providing some useful insight into what we are doing and with what tools.
I’ve already completed the poll with my answers reflecting my working day here at Flow.
The results could be interesting and the more people contribute the more useful it will be, so tell all your Delphi friends. 
Cameron Hart at Flow Software has just blogged about a change he identified in MIDAS.DLL to significantly improve the performance (and capacity) of client data sets when handling large volumes of records and BLOB fields. Basically he seems to have taken the work previously done by Andreas Hausladen and applied it to BLOB’s.
Thanks to commenters I have already learned two useful things as a result of yesterday’s post, both things which I cannot fathom how I did not already know. But here’s something I learned for myself as a result of a comment made by Malcolm Groves at the Auckland Delphi 2010 launch day recently.
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