News
Keep up with all that’s new, including the Editor’s comment on some surprising news from Scotts Valley and Ottawa.

Splat: Sound And Graphics With Delphi
Ray Lischner provides an excellent tutorial on using sounds and graphics in Delphi, with a handy application your pre-school kids will just love!

Under Construction: Internet Security
Bob Swart has some important advice to help secure your data and your customers’ data, covering security layers,  firewalls, proxies and SSL. Plus, he has some useful code which allows you to create password-protected areas on websites.

Beating the System: Wrapping The RAS Services API
Dave Jewell has been delving into the cloudy waters of the Windows Remote Access Services API, which also serves as a timely tutorial on how to wrap an API set as a Delphi object, without getting any unpleasant surprises when moving your code to other platforms, and showing how to fail gracefully if a required API doesn’t exist.

Contain Yourself!
David Baer investigates the goodies to be found in Delphi 5’s new container class unit, plus the enhancements made to TList, and the TInterface list introduced in Delphi 4. Finally, David presents a new flexibly-self-sorting container class of his own.

One Last Compile...
Me, Bill and socks.

Algorithms Alfresco: Happiness Is An Option
Julian Bucknall unwraps some common difficulties using multiple threads in your applications, covering critical sections, mutexes, semaphores and events, plus a solution to the readers/writers problem.

Persistent Fields: Friend Or Foe?
Guy Smith-Ferrier gives us a thorough analysis of both the strengths and weaknesses of persistent fields, dispelling a myth or two along the way, with fresh information from Delphi 5.

COM Corner: COM+ Queued Components
Steve Teixeira outlines COM+ queued components. Included in Windows 2000 Server, and based on Microsoft Message Queue technology, queued components provide a means for COM+ clients to asynchronously invoke methods of COM+ server components. Steve reassures us that things are not as difficult as they sound...

The Delphi Clinic
Brian Long with more answers to your queries, including: RTTI, event handlers, TStrings and object owners, and ListView checkbox changes.