Delphi 2009 - Generics.Collections

CodeGear has given me permission to blog about the upcoming release of Delphi 2009 (Tiburon).

By now, you've probably heard that Delphi 2009 will have generics for Win32. The first thing I always think of is type safe collections that don't require casting. Someone asked what has been added to the RTL to take advantage of the feature. In this first release, the following were added to the RTL in Generics.Collections.pas.

TList
TQueue
TStack
TDictionary

Descendants that optionally manage ownership of objects in the list:

TObjectList
TObjectQueue
TObjectStack
TObjectDictionary

Nick Hodges will be exploring TList in more detail in his "Delphi Language Features" launch webinar on September 3rd.


For And for good measure, Allen Bauer and Barry Kelly have been blogging about less stereotypical uses for generics. Stay tuned for more.

Multicast events using generics
Multicast Events - the cleanup

Tiburon: fun with generics and anonymous methods

Delphi 2009 - PasswordChar

CodeGear has given me permission to blog about the upcoming release of Delphi 2009 (Tiburon).

If you've seen some of the Delphi 2009 demos, you might wonder why they're showing off PasswordChar in TEdit. After all, the feature has been available since Delphi 1.

You'll miss it if you aren't looking closely, but what they're showing is a minor fix in Delphi's Windows theme support. If the password character is an asterisk (*), Delphi 2009 now correctly displays black circles. As Nick Hodges pointed out, it's a small improvement, but certainly one more step in the right direction.

Delphi 2009 - TextHint in TComboBox

CodeGear has given me permission to blog about the upcoming release of Delphi 2009 (Tiburon).

Delphi 2009 adds TextHint support to edit controls, a nice feature that lets you show a grayed out text watermark. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Delphi 2009 extends this support to TComboBox on XP, normally only supported on Vista. Under the covers, they send the Windows message CB_SETCUEBANNER to the ComboBox on Vista and EM_SETCUEBANNER to the ComboBox's edit control on XP.




I've seen a few of these "minor" tweaks in this release, which suggests that CodeGear is spending some time on cleanup and improvement of smaller details and not just big ticket features.

Delphi 2009 - New help content

CodeGear has given me permission to blog about the upcoming release of Tiburon.

You'll find significant new content in the Delphi 2009 help. For example, protected events, fields, methods and properties are now listed with each class's Members. A definite improvement over previous releases.

Delphi 2009 - One less prerequisite

CodeGear has given me permission to blog about the upcoming release of Tiburon.

Here's a small but welcome change. Recent versions of Delphi required the full .Net SDK, at least partly for the help system, and this takes up quite a lot of space. Delphi 2009 doesn't need all of this and just installs the latest version of the Microsoft Document Explorer (or version 8 for Win2K). For the sake of clarity, Delphi 2009 still requires the .Net runtime.

Of course, you can also expect other help improvements, including more content (new classes, components and properties) and improved indexing.

Bruce McGee: A huge thank you to Bruno Fierens and TMS Software!

Due to recent blog postings about TMS Software and their Ribbon Toolbar Component set I do feel the need to state a few things about a fellow CodeGear Technology Partner.

I just wanted to point out that in my limited experience with TMS Software, I have found them to be an outstanding vendor.

And now that I think of it, this might be a good time to give TXAMLViewer a try.