Holger's Thoughts on Delphi

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

New Webpage in the works

Some of you might already have noticed that you can access this page using "www.flickdotnet.de" as well. This will be the domain of my new webpage pretty soon. This is also the reason that there are not many posts from me right now, because I have to do a lot of work on the new page.

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Classes and the Stereotype-property

Today, I read something really interesting in Borland's public newsgroups about ECO III. I always wondered, just like the person, who was asking for help, what the Stereotype-property in ECO classes was used for.

The answer is pretty simple: Nothing.

ECO does not use this property at all, it is there for UML modeling purposes only and will not be transfered into your ECO sourcecode.

However, you can access information on that property during runtime using UmlRt.

Mr. Peter Morris also noted that he used it to categorize his classes. He proposes to google for the phrase "Modeling in Color" in order to get more information on that topic.

Monday, February 06, 2006

ECO and Bold (again)

(My apologies to all RSS users, but the first version of this post simply disappeared from my Blogger-Account)

Today, a user complained in a newsgroup about ECO III. Something did not work the same way as it worked in Bold, which was the Win32 predecessor of ECO, and called ECO a "drawback".

Statements like that always make me mad.

Just because something works differently in a completely reworked, remodeled framework, does not mean it is worse!

In this case, the user was complaining that there were no more visual components included with ECO - at least I thought so. ECO, however, does use the data binding capabilties of the Winforms presentation layer (thanks, Jesper *grin*) in order to display information from the business model inside the GUI. It is a completely different concept, which is way more flexible than what Bold had, if I come to think of it.

In ECO, there is simply no need for special components. You may use any Winforms component that supports data binding with ECO.

For me that is not a "drawback", it is a major improvement.

It is also amazing how easy it is to speak about a thing and mean two totally different things. I was talking about a "Treeview" component that can be dropped on a Winform. The user, who was complaining, spoke about something totally different that was called TBoldTreeView. Mr. Peter Morris was so kind to explain to me what the component did/does and I understand that it has nothing to do with displaying information like I thought.

Friday, February 03, 2006

Microsoft offers most parts of "Windows XP Professional Resource Kit" for free

I just read on the German IT news site heise.de that Microsoft published most of the content of the book titled "Windows XP Professional Resource Kit" on TechNet. That means you can read most of the content for free.

Click here to get to the index.