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WideString Properties
Ray Lischner explains how to use properties of type WideString in your custom components, working round the restrictions of Delphi’s IDE and presenting a custom property editor.

Under Construction: Local ClientDataSets
MIDAS isn’t just for multi-tier apps, says Bob Swart, but we can use it as a handy, compact and very fast local database engine, with just one DLL to ship (and no licence fees either!). Bob goes on to show how to use XML to get data into and out of a local ClientDataSet.

Effective Delphi Class Engineering Part 4: The TObject Of My Affection
David Baer focuses on inheritance in this part of his popular series on object oriented development in Delphi.

Searching In ADSI
Marc Scheuner knows that Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI) is a powerful set of COM objects and interfaces dealing with directories, supporting Active Directory, Novell’s Netware 3.x and NDS, plus Microsoft Windows NT Server and IIS. But he also knows that using COM interfaces can be quite a challenge, so here he presents a Delphi component to wrap up the search capabilities offered by ADSI.

Algorithms Alfresco: Careless Memories
Julian Bucknall has been studying the heap manager in Delphi 5 in an ugly debugging odyssey and shares the fruits of his labour: the structures and algorithms it uses, plus useful code and structures for tracking down nasty bugs that trash the heap manager.

One Last Compile
The Midas Touch

Beating The System: Delphi Hails A CAB
Dave Jewell investigates Microsoft’s CAB file format and develops a Delphi class to access CAB files from your own applications, wrapping up the provided API into something a whole lot easier to use.

Webifying Outlook
Jani Järvinen wanted to be able to get addresses out of his Outlook address book over the web from thousands of miles away... Impossible? No, it just needs some lateral thinking and clever ideas. Jani shares all.

The Delphi Clinic
Brian Long with more answers to your queries, including: converting data files to object format and linking them into your exectuable, using the CPU window, the difference between open arrays and dynamic arrays, and more on the Component Palette corruption problem.