Midnight Beach logo

Main
Publications
Delphi
Turbo Pascal
Other
Resume
Services
History
Contact
e-volunteer
Search

.NET Publications
Book
.NET 2.0 for Delphi Programmers
Apress, June 2006
.NET 2.0, from a Delphi point of view. Finally in print and available from Amazon.

.NET is a lot like Delphi. .NET has components, events, exceptions, interfaces, and objects that descend via single inheritance from a common ancestor. Delphi programmers will find .NET easier to learn than VB or MFC programmers will.

This book doesn't ask you to plow through things you already know in the hopes of picking up a few choice bits of new information; it presents the core concepts of the .NET world in terms of the Delphi concepts you're familiar with.

From your employer's point of view, .NET offers managed code plus Delphi's traditional productivity advantages, without Delphi's traditional drawback of being a niche product that few programmers know. From your point of view, .NET offers something like a hundred times as many possible jobs - and it puts the fun back in programming.

.NET offers what you've always loved about Delphi, without locking you into a narrow ghetto. This book will help you transfer your Delphi skills to the broader, brighter world outside the ghetto walls.

Articles and Talks
  1. Color Theory for Developers
    Magazine article: DevSource, December 7, 2006
    The HSB color model is a better way to think about colors than RGB. HSB tells you why some colors are good forgeround or background colors, and why some colors go together better than other. Examples, heuristics, and code for generating random color schemes.
  2. Easy Parallelization
    Magazine article: DevSource, May 23, 2006
    It is quite easy to take a simple iterative loop and parallelize it: the foreach body does an asynchronous BeginInvoke to process each item in its own thread, instead of processing each item synchronously. It is not much harder to use a Semaphore to match the number of active threads to the number of processors.
  3. The System ThreadPool
    Magazine article: DevSource, April 23, 2006
    The ThreadPool is ideal when you want to run some code asynchronously and you don't need any special control over the thread, because the ThreadPool reduces thread creation costs by reusing threads.
  4. Advanced Delegates
    SDForum Windows SIG talk, April 5, 2006, and SacDotNet, April 25, 2006
    Delegates may be the least-understood part of the CLR. Delegates look a bit like method pointers, but the differences go well beyond delegates' multi-cast abilities. I started with a quick survey of delegate basics, including invocation list editing and event syntax (which few people seem to really understand). I then explored 2.0's anonymous methods before concluding with a lengthy discussion of asynchronous delegate execution and the system ThreadPool. I also touched on minor topics like covariance and contravariance as well as creating a delegate instead of repeatedly invoking a dynamically loaded method. (PowerPoint slides)
  5. Asynchronous Delegates
    Magazine article: DevSource, March 25, 2006
    Many people do not know that any delegate can be invoked asynchronously (provided that there's one and only one entry in the invocation list). This is a 1.0 feature which has only gotten more appealing in 2.0, with its expanded range of delegates.
  6. .NET 2.0: open types, anonymous methods, iterators, and asynch primitives
    eBig user group talk, February 16, 2006
    Now that .NET 2.0 is out of beta, we can use the new features in production code. I surveyed 2.0 features and talked about how they can be used in real programs. Open types can make code both smaller and faster. Anonymous methods make your code smaller and clearer. Iterators make it much easier to enumerate nested data structures. I also talked a bit about the existing .NET asynch features - particularly the system thread pool, and asynch invocation of delegates. (PowerPoint slides)
  7. Dynamic Plugins: Using the AppDomain Class to Load and Unload Code
    Magazine article: DevSource, April 27, 2005
    How to load and call code in a temporary AppDomain without affecting your original AppDomain.
  8. Adding Controls To Forms
    Magazine article: DevSource, August 31, 2004
    How to drag a control from a custom Visual Studio tool window to a form.
  9. Hosting A C# UserControl
    Magazine article: DevSource, August 30, 2004
    A step-by-step guide to hosting a UserControl in a Visual Studio tool window.
  10. Delegates vs. Interfaces
    Magazine article: DevSource, June 24, 2004
    Delegates look like method pointers but (in .NET 1.1) delegates are slow, because they are multi-cast. Interfaces can be faster, and more general.
  11. Object Oriented State Machines
    Magazine article: DevSource, March 17, 2004
    Implementing state machines with objects, not enum and switch statements.
  12. .NET Architecture, reprise
    eBig user group talk, April 2003
    A repeat of my BorCon talk. (PowerPoint slides, without BorCon sponsor logos)
  13. .NET Architecture
    Euro BorCon talk, October 2002
    A programmer's introduction to .Net - what it is, and what's in it for us. Includes: runtime functional groups; jitting and garbage collection; common type system and language neutrality; .Net object model (like the Delphi object model, but not identical); framework classes and "learn once, work anywhere." (PowerPoint slides)
Created on March 23, 2006, last updated December 7, 2006 • Contact jon@midnightbeach.com