News
Keep up with all that’s fresh in the world of Delphi and Kylix: exciting new products and services for our favourite development tools.
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Implementing Thread-Safe Queues In Virtual Lists
Martin Humby has been working with inter-thread messaging, which of course needs a message queue for the target thread. Windows provides these queues, but they are not ideal: messages must conform to the standard TMessage format and access is slow. To overcome these issues Martin examines a neat way of programming queues to provide thread-safe access without synchronisation, and discusses the advantages of writing multiprocessor- safe operations in assembler.
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Under Construction: Consuming Win32 In .NET Using Virtual Library Interfaces
Bob Swart describes how to use this new Delphi feature for importing and using Win32 DLLs in your .NET projects, explaining the steps you need to take, the benefits and the drawbacks too.
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Using COM Without Using The Registry
Brian Long shows that, contrary to most folks’ assumptions, it is in fact possible to use COM without having to fill the Windows registry to overflowing with entry after entry. The secret is Registration-Free COM, which involves what Microsoft likes to call assemblies (but is nothing to do with .NET). Confused? Don’t worry, Brian explains everything clearly and with examples too.
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Object Persistence
Julian Bucknall demonstrates how to write a poor man’s object-oriented database manager: storing arbitrary .NET objects in a binary file and then reading them back using a random access method. Having dealt with some issues around equality, he examines the options and comes up with an implementation, only to suggest an open-source alternative that you might just prefer!
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Review: TargetProcess 1.3 RC1
Craig Murphy reviews TargetProcess Suite 1.3: an innovative webserver- based project planning, management and bug-tracking application which is designed for teams of developers who utilise the new agile development processes such as extreme programming, SCRUM or Crystal. Could this make the difference you need in managing your projects?
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The Delphi Clinic
Brian Long with more answers to your own queries on Delphi and Kylix, including: finding out which executable process owns any given window, a scrolling bug in Delphi 2005 applications, fixing broken Windows Help support, the newest Delphi 2005 update, default project directory issues, local variables and re-arranging the Delphi 7 and earlier Component Palette.
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