There are two very different database offerings from CodeGear, an old well-established and excellent engine called InterBase, and a newer one that is actually rewritten from JDataStore called Blackfis

Delphi is one of the greatest development environments every produced for Windows. It has an easy to learn, yet strict language that leads to less confusion than C++ and better coding practices than Visual BASIC. Unfortuneately, it has been marketed by a company that has made so many changes in direction and name that people have laughed it off. One more change has happened recently, here is the story, which actually starts over 25 years ago, before Windows.

Code to build a sand simulator in Delphi.

For a long time, I've enjoyed a handy method in Delphi's TStringList class to read in and write out a CSV-formatted line of text. For example,

is a typical CSV string with each field delimited by commas and each string delineated by double quotes. The CommaText function turns that string into a list of 4 strings:

• Fred A.
• Thimsfrabble
• Lake Oswego
• OR

Notice that both the field delimiting commas and the string quotes are removed from the parsed fields.

Now what happens if a string has an embedded quote?

In Borland Developer Studio 2006, and Delphi 2005 (with the help of the Compact Framework compiler preview), it has been possible with a little work to create Delphi for .NET applications which target

The Opera browser has a feature called Speed Dial which is basically a grid of your 9 (or more) favorite web sites presented using thumbnails instead of the blank page you get when you add a new tab.

How to programmatically find the size of a folder using Delphi.

To emphasize the importance of a modal form and the information it presents, you could gray out the main form of the application when the modal form is activated.

The winner entry of CodeGear's Video Competition is a nice "Rotating Circles Form" program... a useless application that shows circular forms on the screen and moves them around at a hectic speed.

The custon TDesktopCanvas canvas allows you to access the Windows Desktop, and draw on it!

Microsoft likes to take credit for "innovations" in software. But usually, they just steal or purchase other companies' ideas. For example, Borland pioneered Integrated Development Environments back when most people had 5¼" floppy disks and CPU Mhz was rated in "K" units. Turbo Pascal was a terrific way to quickly create applications, and allowed the programmer to edit, compile, and run their programs without creating a bunch of batch files and launching them just before going out for lunch.

Structure and details of Live Templates.

A live template can call YOUR custom function when a user invokes it. For instance, a template could brings up a message saying "How disgusting." when a user types "GOTO", and then proceed to erase the GOTO.

Live Templates submissons at CodeGear's Code Central.

In this blog we'll step through creating a simple template to make a more type safe descendant of TBucketList. This will go over the basics of code template creation which are:

* Naming the template and specifying the target language.

Live templates are a nice new feature in BDS 2006, but they are badly documented (as Borland acknowledged). I expect someone will write a blog or a BDN article on the subject soon, but I thought a qui

Delphi 2006 introduced a feature called "Live Templates" that allows one to write macro type templates that expand from a keyword and are parameterized, i.e. you can tab through the parameters and supply them one by one.

The Delphi Wiki is a collaborative project to create the most definitive, accurate, and accessible database, reference and community for everything related to Delphi, the premier development tool and language for Windows development.

Delphi does not include an implementation of HTML Help, but one can easily be created. The process involves creating some APIs that call the HTMLHelp API and trapping Delphi application events to trigger the HTML Help system.

In Delphi 2006 and above, a very cool feature has been added: Live Templates. In one of 30 Demos in 30 Days, Nick Hodges he explains how to use and create live templates.