The event was just awesome! Not only did I get a first-hand preview of Delphi 2009 and some excellent information on other Embarcadero products, but I was able to catch up with fellow CodeGear contractors and community members in person. Networking is just something one should never underestimate. Furthermore, it is just more fun to talk than to use text-messaging services like Skype, for example.

The product demonstrations for Delphi were done by Daniel Magin and Matthias Eissing. In case you have never experienced one of their sessions, make sure to visit one of the next DevTracks or other event they speak at.

Dr. Sultan Shiffa introduced ER/Studio from Embarcadero. An immensely powerful database tool no database architect should miss, in my opinion.

And of course, Sabine Rothe from CodeGear provided food and drinks for coffee breaks and an excellent lunch!

It really was an event to remember which I shared with about 200 other members of the Delphi community.

And the best thing… the fee to attend this awesome event was 0 EUR, i.e. 0 $. Yes, really!

If I could trigger your interest in other DevTracks events, be sure to check out the official site at http://www.devtracks.de. See below for a map where the event took place.

I love what I found with a first glimpse! There is a tab called “Ribbon Controls” that contains 5 additional VCL Controls to allow you to build applications with Ribbon support.

• TRibbon
• TRibbonComboBox
• TRibbonSpinEdit
• TScreenTipsManager
• TScreenTipsPopup

In order to get known with the functionality, I opened the Ribbon demo, which also is included with Delphi 2009. This is what the demo looks like in the VCL Forms Designer:

As you can see the most interesting fact is that the Ribbon Controls integrate in to the well-known VCL ActionBand and ActionList logic. This will make it very comfortable to add Ribbon support to existing applications.
Furthermore, you can drop any VCL control in a Ribbon Group, but there are also special Ribbon Controls, like TRibbonComboBox which adds grouping support to a combo box. Have a look at the screenshot….

Designing a Ribbon is very easy as the designer offers menu items in the context menus to add pages and groups.

All in all, this looks like a cool feature!

This post refers to a beta release of Delphi 2009. Features might look different or be omitted in the final release

I just finished installing to be precise and I am amazed already.

Thinking back to last year, I filled out the Delphi Survey which was initiated by Nick Hodges. One of my major grudges about Delphi 2007 was the time needed to install it. Thus, I put in a request for a better install time. Delphi 2009 surely delivers in this regard. It takes about 5 minutes to completely install Delphi 2009 on my system. Considering that this number was at about 10 minutes for Highlander, it is a great improvement.

All information given here refers to a pre-release beta version of Delphi 2009.

As I mentioned before, I mostly used the standard .NET components or VCL controls. Data-based VCL controls can be bound to TDataSource (and derivatives due to polymorphism). If an item is being selected, the cursor in the source moves accordingly. Thus, there is no difficulty to determine which row in the dataset it selected as it is the current row of the dataset.

.NET uses a different system of databinding, especially as you can bind - as I tend to say, but please do not take it literally - anything to a control. It is very flexible in that regard. Let us not even consider the possibilities that arise due to WPF.

In my last blog post I bound an XtraTreeList to a datasource of the datatype List<>. Any .NET standard control implements some kind of CurrencyHandler, which I find a bit too complex to use for a simple “Tell me what is selected”. Thus, I like ECO very much that it delivers a means to determine a selected object in a list of objects via its CurrencyManagerHandle. It always points to the selected object and you have a reference you can work with.

Now to XtraTreeList. In my example it is bound to a datasource that implements the IList interface. From reading the documentation I found out that it is very important that there is a difference between focused and selected row. Be aware that these terms play a major role which also depends on the fact if your list allows multi-selection or not.

In this case, we do not have multi-selection, thus the property we are interested in is called FocusedNode. The object instance we get as a return value is not of the element type of the list we bound to. Very unlucky. So, we need to investigate the return type. IntelliSense immediately offers “Id” as a property that looks like we could use.

In my example I query it like this:

[code lang="c#"]
int id = trFolders.FocusedNode.Id;
[/code]

The Id designates the index of the element inside the element list we bound to. Excellent. I wonder why it is not named accordingly, but it is something I can live with

This leads to my final implementation to get the selected FolderTreeItem in my example:

[code lang="c#"]
public FolderTreeItem SelectedFolderTreeItem
{
get
{
int id = trFolders.FocusedNode.Id;
FolderTreeItem selectedItem = dataSource[id];
return selectedItem;
}
}
[/code]

I hope this will be helpful for people as all the examples delivered with XtraTreeView I could find do not deliver an example for this. I am not saying they do not exist, but they were too hard for me to find. Furthermore, I am still used to the other means to get the selected object and can be considered “user at a basic stage” regarding the DX control set.