Code Faster in Delphi Book

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.

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Code Better in Delphi Book

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?

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Movie #99 - Mouse Cursors in FireMonkey

In this YouTube video we look at how to change the mouse cursor in FireMonkey in a way that should work on all platforms (although I've not tested it). We further look at how we can do this with a single line of code, using a cleaver trick by returning an interface from a function. The video is about 12 minutes long.

Movie #98 - Exit

In this video we take a look at a couple of features of the Delphi exit statement.  These are the fact that you can specify a parameter to the exit statement, and that finally blocks are always obeyed even when you call exit.  It's two minutes long.

Movie #97 - Common Delphi Coding Anti-Patterns

During this session you'll either be thinking "I do that" (and hopefully you'll stop) or "I remember doing that" (while cringing at the memory). There are certain coding patterns that all Delphi programmers seem to use at some stage - some of them sub-optimal, some weird, and some just plain wrong. Collectively I've called them Anti-Patterns, and in this session you'll get to see some of my favorites (or, anti-favorites).  Watch on YouTube, the video is about half an hour long.

Movie #96 - Escaping the Try...Finally...Free Nest

We all want to do the right thing with memory management and make sure we tidy up after ourselves. However as our code gets buried in successive layers of object allocation, try, finally, free "nests" it all becomes a bit onerous -- and, well, resembling a pterodactyl nest. In this session, we look at a technique to flatten out your code so that it will look less attractive as habitation for a friendly pterosaur, and as a side benefit, improve readability. Along the way we use interfaces, generics and anonymous methods to build our over-engineered object de-allocation artifice.  Watch the video on YouTube. This video is about half an hour long.

Movie #95 - Margins and Padding Confusion

In this YouTube video I take a look at the fact that depending on what version of Delphi and if you are using FireMonkey or the VCL, the definitions of Margins and Padding on controls are different.  Up until Delphi XE4, the usage of Margins and Padding in FireMonkey was reversed to that of the VCL, but now this situation has changed and they are the same, making margins and padding different in FireMonkey between XE3 and XE4 -  confused, watch the video.

Movie #94 - Begin instead of Initialization

In this 4 minute video we look at the initialization and finalization sections of Delphi units, and how you can use begin instead of initialization - which may cause you some grief in some instances.  Watch the video.  In the video I also mention CnPack, which has some highly useful utilities.

Movie #93 - Fish Facts for iOS

In this video I write my first iOS application, the classic Fish Facts application - soon to be available in the App Store (or not).  We do this with the recently released Delphi XE4.  Watch it on YouTube.

Movie #92 - Renaming Component Events

In this video we take a quick look at form inheritance, and why renaming component events can cause you problems.  The video is 7 minutes long.

Movie #91 - Assigning to an Items Property

"If you assign a stringlist to a combobox items property using ':=', you still have to free the stringlist." This tweet by Nick Hodges is probably very obvious to any seasoned Delphi developer, however I think it's far from obvious to someone new to Delphi. In this video we take a look why we need to "free the stringlist". Watch on Youtube, it's less than 5 minutes long.

Movie #90 - Code Fonts

In this video we take a look at changing the default font for the code editor in the IDE (Courier New), to something better.  After a bit of research online I give a few recommendations as to what font to use, watch this video on YouTube to find out.  The video is 5 minutes long.