Delphi 5 Developer's Guide

The Borland Delphi 5 Developer's Guide is a complete reference showing developers what they need to know most about Delphi 5. The authors deal with developers every day and offer sound skills, advice, and technical knowledge on the most advanced features of Delphi 5. The text begins with a tour of Delphi 5 basics, including improvements since version 1. After observing object-oriented Pascal programming, including advanced language features, the authors turn to the strengths of using the Visual Component Library (VCL) application frameworks. They include several invaluable sections for corporate developers, including a "coding standards" document. Sections on combining VCL with ActiveX controls round out the basic tour. Advanced topics include graphics programming, building dynamic link-libraries (DLLs), printing, and multithreading. A rich tour of VCL components, including instructions on how to create custom components, and ActiveX internals follows. The rest of the book examines strategies for creating applications, from traditional two-tiered, client/server database applications to applications that use the Internet to deliver HTML on the fly using server-side Delphi objects. Finally, the authors look at n-tiered applications that make use of Delphi's powerful MIDAS architecture for distributed computing.