DaVinci Unlimited Software

It appears I am saying my good-bye to two of my old friends.  I knew this was coming on both accounts, but the reality is finally here.  First of all, I good-bye to Borland, hello to Embarcadero.  The people and products will still be there, but it is a new company.  I expect this to be a change for the best.  Now I need to figure out a way to re-brand all this Borland merchandise I own. . . .

My second old friend I bid farewell to is bsdg.org.  I registered the doman name when I took over as president of the Boise Software Developers Group back in 2000.  In that time it also became my first blog site, which I found quite enjoyable.  At my high point I broke the news about PDC 2005 thanks to an email from the organizer, and that resulted in links from Robert Scoble as well as many others.

As of October 2007 I moved away from Boise, and Chris Brandsma took over as president of BSDG.  At one point I debated changing to to the Borland Software Developers Group and keeping the domain name, but Delphi was already dropping the Borland roots at that point.  All my old blog posts are still there someplace, but they are hidden behind a wall of cryptic 404 errors provided by the ASP.NET CMS that was recently installed.  Rather sad.  Maybe I will migrate some of the content here. . . . .

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!

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