Category Archives: Programming

Did you notice that there is a free trial of SQL Azure? Well, I stepped into it – just to gain experience.

You have unit tests, don’t you? Or at least you run some tests to make sure your recent changes broke something? These regression tests are vital to any serious software development. What would your customers say when they get a … Continue reading →

In the ancient days of Windows XP and Delphi 7 I used to provide a preview of the proprietary file content inside the file open dialog of one of my applications. This was accomplished by deriving from TOpenDialog, just like … Continue reading →

Back from Delphi Developer Days (Kudos to Marco and Cary) and after cleaning up the mess in my inbox I would like to share some thought I had during one of the sessions named “Delphi: Today and Tomorrow”. Some of … Continue reading →

In Delphi’s TThread class there is Synchronize to call a method in the context of the GUI thread. This is necessary in case, for example, you want to update a progressbar or a status label in a form, because the … Continue reading →

The interface approach introduced in Part 2 of this series and extended in Part 3 did cover most of our needs. But there is nothing that can’t be done better with the right tools.

In Part 2 of this series we learned about a more flexible implementation of the Visitor Pattern than the traditional approach. But we can do better.

In Part 1 of this series we learned about the benefits of the Visitor Pattern and saw a basic approach according to the GoF description. As clean and elegant the visitor pattern might look in the first place, it nonetheless … Continue reading →

Some of you might have already heard of the Visitor Pattern, especially if you have read the GoF book Design Patterns, but do you really use it? Do you use it often? The common answer to this question is No. … Continue reading →

Thanks to this article by Raymond Chen we can read what garbage collection really is and (perhaps even more valuable) what it is not. I don’t want to start a new flame war about garbage collection (and even when – … Continue reading →