Athena

Delphi 4 in Depth

This was a UK BUG MasterClass held on 1st September, 1998 in Hammersmith, England.

Click here for the files that accompany this seminar.


Delphi 4 - have you upgraded to it, are planning to do so or wondering if you should? Then this intensive, one-day training course is for you.

It runs from 10 am until 6pm, with the following agenda.

10:00 - The IDE

In this first session we examine closely the Delphi development environment, looking in detail at the enhancements made since version 3. These include:

Drag and dock nature

11:00 - Debugging facilities

Delphi has always had a debugger worthy of a 3GL. Now we have lots more helpful stuff including:

12:00 - Language enhancements

Here we look at what takes this release of the Inprise Object Pascal compiler up to version 12:

13:00 - Lunch

14:00 - The VCL

Next under the microscope is the Visual Component Library, which has been improved with a lot of the stuff we see in the IDE:

15:00 - COM/CORBA Support

For Client/Server Suite owners, the already good COM support has been extended.

COM objects can now work within MTS (Microsoft's Transaction Server).

Automation objects have optional event support.

You can build CORBA objects (objects that conform to the OMG's

Common Object Request Broker Architecture spec) and talk to other CORBA objects which may not even reside on Wintel platforms.

We look at how all this stuff operates in as much detail as time allows.

16:00 - The BDE

TTable objects have more component editors.

(Now up to version 5, and allegedly smaller and faster) supports Access 97 (Delphi 3's BDE did not).

Also there is direct support for the extensions to be found in Oracle 8 including abstract data types, arrays and nested tables.

Finally, the Visual Query Builder has been laid to rest and replaced with rather better SQL Builder.

17:00 - MIDAS

As far as MIDAS goes, the prime improvement that we will be able to see is that you can write your middle-tier server application using whichever distributed architecture you like: COM, MTS, CORBA, sockets.

New components allow this to be done with relative ease. Also, the MIDAS technology itself has been improved to allow more control and flexibility in communication between client and server applications.