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Adam’s October 2019 Meeting Summary

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Agenda

  • Ten Modern Language Features You Couldn’t Possibly Be Without, Maybe – Will Watts
  • Actions, Action Lists And Action Managers – Brian Long
  • A Simpleton’s approach to writing a Windows Service – Robert Evans

Adam’s Summary

Developer Group Meeting October 2019

Hosted by Brian Long

“Free” bundling of Enterprise Connectors with more expensive Delphi editions was discussed, giving Enterprise and Architect licensees access to data-connectivity across 90 modern data-platforms from Amazon to Google and many others.

Will discussed “About 10 new language features you may never need.” in his usual witty, informed and acerbic style. Starting with Lambda Expressions and Closures (“Not new by any definition, but I’ll cover them anyway”), Rust, Coroutines, modern mechanisms for call-backs and anonymous methods, modern takes on generation of compiler errors and (more briefly) Monads, Tuples and a brief discussion of the joys of VS Code.

Robert spoke about Creating Windows Services, pretty old-school stuff, but useful as it is the type of program someone will need to you write sometime. Delphi has an easy mechanism for creating programs which are Windows Services, but Robert usually writes his program as a standard exe first (to enable debugging and testing) as services have no visual UI for interaction.

Brian gave us a thorough and extremely useful (for me anyway) session on Actions. A Delphi technology from the early 2000’s which are very useful for disconnecting UI from functional code, with a built-in mechanism to update UI so its state matches the state of the action. Actions make it massively easier for the “enabled” state of a button to immediately reflect what is going on in a program, and to allow multiple elements of UI (Menu-items, buttons etc.) to all share this state correctly. Actions and ActionLists manage the whole of this process. Action Managers and Action Bars were introduced later as extensions of the technology, allowing easy user-customization of UI. They have uses, but have dated badly, as their architecture reflects software fashion of the Win XP era.

… and then beer was drunk.