Adam’s July 2017 Meeting Feedback

Hi there, July meeting round up.

• New session timetable leaves the problem clinic a bit squished for time, but we do get to go out and have a slap-up lunch across the road.
• Will gave us 90 minutes of functional programming (“FP”) which seems to involve writing about 10% of the code we are used to, and can be done in C#, JavaScript, C++ and a bunch of languages I have never heard of like Erlang, D, Elm and Haskell. Totally absent from Delphi unfortunately … maybe in the future.
  My main take-away was the idea of Functions as First Class objects, meaning you can pass functions to functions and return functions from functions. This allows the programmer to remove virtually all loops from their code making it more portable and reusable.
  Forget For and ForEach … a video to get you going……. link available in the Facebook Group
• Neil, showed how to download data from a HTTPS URL into a Delphi application in 4 different ways: TIdHTTP (Indy pre-XE8 and post-XE8), TDownloadURL (Legacy Delphi) and TNetHTTP (Delphi since XE8). The takeaway was TNetHTTP is easiest (if you are in XE8 world), and TIdHTTP doesn’t work (unless you are in XE8 world, in which case you have to bodge your way through with TDownloadURL.
• Mark showed how to try to keep your business’s emails on White-Lists, even when you are sending out a lot of them. This is complicated, and includes adding a Reverse DNS Record to your own server, including an SPF Record within this, and completing on-line reputation-checking form-filling for Microsoft (SNDS and JMRP) and Google.
• Martin showed some really quick and easy ways to use TMS Software’s Flexcel TFlexCelReport component to pass data from Delphi into pre-formatted Excel-spreadsheets. These spreadsheets need some simple tags to be added so that data is populated as desired. Remarkably simple, and powerful.

“Adam Brett – longtime BUG member”