DaVinci Unlimited Software

The session “Leveraging What You Have: 10 Top Things Added to Delphi Since Delphi 7″ by Pawel Glowacki was one I was looking forward too. The audio and video quality was a little poor, so I skipped it to watch later when I had more time. Pawel posted his list though, with a lot of details. That is probably more valuable to me then the video session. If the video was chopped up by list item so I could jump to a feature I was unfamiliar with, that would be really cool.

There are a lot of really cool enhancements since Delphi 7. I know a lot of people were holding out on Delphi 7 because it was such a solid release. Delphi 8 was .NET only, and of questionable stability. Since then each release has gotten much better. I must say, Delphi 2007 is definitely worthy of an upgrade from Delphi 7.

So I am breaking the cardinal rule of attending a virtual developers conference: multitasking. Sure, that is one of the advantages, but at the same time, it really detracts from how much you get from the conference if you are are tying to do your job at the same time (not to mention it detracts from your job performance). Normally I would commit some time, but we are on a serious deadline right now, so I am getting it done.

As a result I am skimming many of the sessions. I’ll catch them on replay.

BITS is Microsoft’s Background Intelligent Download Service. It was added in XP to allow downloading of security patches in the background. In the Platform SDK Microsoft provided a COM interface to allow developers to work with BITS. Unfortunately it is a bit of a pain to actually get to the interface, especially if you are not using Visual Studio. To make it easier for Delphi developers to work with BITS, I am providing my imported Type Library for the BackgroundCopyManager.

Alternatively you can use the JEDI Win32 API Library available on Sourceforge. It has the Bits interface (version 1.5) split into a few different files (JwaBits1_5.pas, JwaBits.pas, JwaBitscfg.pas, and JwaBitsMsg.pas [although they reference other included files]) and cleaned up a little bit. In addition it includes a number of other useful Delphi wrappers for Win32 API’s. I recommend this library over the raw TLB import. My demo will work with either one.

UPDATE: I recreated the demo and added it to the archive!

(more…)