News
Keep up with all that’s new in the world of Delphi development.

Maximizing Web Applications With Database Pools
Jason Southwell addresses the problem of getting your database-driven web applications to scale seamlessly, showing how to implement database connection pooling to avoid those awful ‘site busy...’ messages.

Beating The System: Delphi Meets .NET
Dave Jewell has been poking around in Microsoft’s goodie bag again, this time inside the GDI+ DLL which is part of the Redmond giant’s exciting new .NET framework. He explains how we can access GDI+ from Delphi to use some cute new drawing capabilities: clever brushes, alpha blending and more.

The Data Shape OLE DB Provider
Guy Smith-Ferrier explains how this provider, also known as MSDataShape and introduced in ADO 2.0, provides some useful functionality: hierarchical recordsets, parameterised hierarchies, reshaping, aggregate functions, grouping, adding blank fields and more.

Algorithms Alfresco: The Man-Machine
Julian Bucknall investigates state machines (or finite automata if you want to be clever), showing how they can provide elegant and efficient solutions to a number of programming problems.

Effective Delphi Class Engineering Part 6: To Talk Of Many Things
David Baer concludes his series on developing Delphi classes with a miscellany of sound advice, ranging from events to exceptions, RTTI and message handling.

Under Construction: Wireless Application Protocol, Part 2
Bob Swart continues his explanation of writing applications that your WAP phone can access, covering the use of WAP images in the WBMP format.

One Last Compile
The Empire Strikes Back

Time Is The Simplest Thing
...not! Primoz Gabrijelcic has been researching the different time systems used throughout the world and constructing a library of routines for converting between them.

The Delphi Clinic
Brian Long with more answers to your queries, including: dataset actions, keystroke handling, drag and drop, and conditional compilation.