This book will make you a faster Delphi developer, it doesn't matter if you are just starting out, or have been using Delphi since version 1, you will find all sorts of tips, tricks and hacks to boost your productivity.
Make your Delphi code better by reading this book! You will find numerous tips, tricks, techniques and tools to enhance and improve code. How does your code stack up? Are you writing code that will be usable for years, or are you heading towards a dystopian maintenance apocalypse?
I'm going to be taking a look at some of the controls offered by DevExpress, who commercially produce 3rd party controls for Delphi. Check out this 10 minute introduction to TcxTextEdit.
If you think that disabling a control will prevent a user from using that control then you need to watch this video. As a quick summary: if you can get the windows handle of a control, you can send messages to that control and changes it's properties.
This is the classic bowling game code kata, it's an illustration of test driven development.
I was first made aware of it in one of Uncle Bob's (Robert C Martin) videos on CleanCoders.com. I've produced this as an example of doing it using Delphi. This video was produced for the Intensive Delphi online conference, you can find the channel for it here.
There are a lot of things skipped in this this kata (edge cases, bad input etc.), but it does provide a simple and clear introduction on how to do TDD. Watch it on YouTube.
This was a talk that I did for the ADUG Winter Symposium (4-Aug-2016) in Sydney. In it I build a cross-platform (Windows/Android) application for calculating fractals. It's on fractals, code optimizations and parallel programming. The images and details about the super-computers is from Wikipedia and the fractal zoom animation in the beginning is https://youtu.be/a26UXXVQAHg. Watch this presentation on YouTube, it's 85 minutes long - so grab some popcorn. I'll make the source code available shortly. You can alternatively watch the Melbourne version of this talk that repeated the following day (5-Aug-2016).
Have you changed your default colors in Delphi? If not you probably should. With adjusting the colors you can gain greater insight into your code, you can reduce the strain on your eyes and you can make Delphi look just plain cooler. This video is four and a half minutes long and you can watch it on YouTube.
In this six minute video we look at the various techniques that can be used to indent and format code - some you will probably know - others you might not.
TDictionary in Delphi is an extremely useful container, however the default method by which your 'keys' get hashed might be undesirable. Being able to alter this can give you far greater flexibility when taking advantage of the Generic Dictionary collection. You can watch the video on my channel (with keystrokes but without Q&A) or the Embarcadero version. This video is a replay from CodeRage X.
Adjusting the tab order in your applications can be painful and tedious - watch this video and learn how using the tab order wizard in CnPack you can save yourself a world of hurt.
In this 6 minute video we take a look at how we can use TGridPanel to control the layout of your forms and make them responsive to a change in size such that controls scale proportionally. The TGridPanel is quite a powerful and flexible container control, make sure you understand how it works to take full advantage of it. I cover TGridPanel in much more detail in one of my premium videos.
In this video we have a quick look at the form settings that you can change that will improve your dialogs, and remove areas that often cause difficulties for your users.