Toronto Delphi Users Group

Based on feedback from subscribers, here is the schedule for the next few months:

First, we will be taking our traditional summer break, so no meeting in August.

We have booked rooms at the North York Central Library (5120 Yonge St) for the following dates between 6:00 and 8:00 PM:

Tuesday, September 22
Tuesday, October 13
Thursday, November, 19

We will send out reminders for each of these.

We don’t have topics for these meetings and are open to suggestions. Let us know what you want to talk about.

As promised, this meeting didn’t have a specific topic and we had an open discussion instead. Here are some of the (on topic) things that came up. If anyone remembers other interesting tid-bits, please feel free to chime in.

DelphiFeeds has offered a collection of Delphi related blogs and links in one place for a long time. Another, similar service started called Begin..End. If you want to keep up to date on all things Delphi, you should be following one of these.

Lots of discussion about jobs:
You’ll notice that there have been a couple of job posts on the TDUG site recently. If you are looking for people, please let us know.

Positions are actively posted to our site by the people offering the jobs, and we try not to go fishing for job ads to post ourselves. If you are looking for Delphi jobs, one aggregate site that I like is EngineerJobs. They specialise in technical positions, so have fewer false positives.

I noticed this interesting entry in Ottawa – “Medical Marijuana Software Developer”. 🙂

A friend pointed me to a job ad posted with the title “C# Developer”. He thought it was funny because, in spite of the title, they were primarily looking for Delphi skills. I’m pretty sure it was a typo and it has since been re-posted as “Adaptiv Project Consultant” – also listed on engineerjobs.

In Delphi XE8, Embarcadero introduced native the HTTP Client API. Embarcadero is giving an overview of these tomorrow in one of their online Developer Skill Sprints. If you can attend live, there will be a Q&A session afterwards. otherwise, the replay will be available later on.

I hadn’t heard about this, and it came as a bit of a surprise. I’m happy that Embarcadero didn’t make Windows Phone support a higher priority just yet. I’m curious to see where Microsoft goes from here.

A handful of people will usually stick around for a drink and some more discussion after meetings. The Frog and Firkin (now just The Frog?) was a popular choice. This time we tried Jack Asters. The food was average (imho), but they have a great rooftop patio and perfect weather to enjoy it. Well spotted, Brian.

Whenever possible, future meetings will be at the North York The North York Central Library at 5120 Yonge Street between the hours of 6:00 PM and 8:00 PM. Possibly on a Thursday close to the end of the month. People have told us that the location is convenient. The earlier hours are to help save money. If we book past 8:00 PM, we need to pay to have a security guard stick around. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Traditionally, TDUG doesn’t meet in the summer since most people take some vacation time then. That, along with the traffic from the Pan-Am games, makes us think that we shouldn’t have an August meeting and pick back up in September. Let us know your thoughts.

The next meeting will be at the North York Central Library on Yonge Street, north of Sheppard Avenue.

Meeting times and locations have moved around recently. Unless there are objections, we should have a more regular schedule. I suggest something like we had before where meetings were around the third Thursday of the month at the 5120 Yonge Street location.

We don’t have a speaker for this meeting, and I would like to make it an open discussion.

If you have a technical problem, pet peeve, question about the job market or just want to talk about best practices or the future of Delphi; Bring them to the meeting. I think it will be interesting.

Thursday, July 9th, 2015
North York Central Library – 5120 Yonge Street
6:00PM to 8:00PM

I apologise for not posting this sooner.

I’d like to thank Tim Young for coming to talk to us about their upcoming Elevate Web Builder 2 (EWB2), a development environment for building web applications. You can write in Object Pascal and the compiler will produce the necessary HTML and JavaScript.

I knew it would be an interesting presentation. Tim is always a great and technical speaker. However, I was blown away by how functional, productive and flexible this product is. On top of the things you would expect (fast development, easy styling, etc), EWB2 includes both front end and server functionality, database and JSON features  and lets you extend the server using Delphi. Especially if you’ve had to code any of these things yourself.

There was a draw for a full license of EWB2. Congratulations to Brian Muegge, the lucky winner.

EWB2 has now officially been released. They have also published updated product information and an introductory video.