Alister Christie of New Zealand is our MVP of the Week. Alister is the master of Delphi video trainings with his site at LearnDelphi.tv. He has over 100 free videos, and then over 30 more hours of premium videos. A great resource for people new to Delphi development, or anyone who wants to take their skill to the next level.
When I was in New Zealand I got a chance to sit down with Alister and Damien Bootsma for a short interview.
Alister has a lot of great content on his YouTube channel, including more interviews and technical trainings. Here are a few of his recent CodeRage sessions for you to check out too.
Flexible and Supercharged Key Hashing with TDictionary
TDictionary in Delphi is an extremely useful container, however the default method by which your ‘keys’ get hashed might be undesirable. Being able to alter this can give you far greater flexibility when taking advantage of the Generic Dictionary collection.
Common Delphi Coding Anti-Patterns
During this session you’ll either be thinking “I do that” (and hopefully you’ll stop) or “I remember doing that” (while cringing at the memory). There are certain coding patterns that all Delphi programmers seem to use at some stage – some of them sub-optimal, some weird, and some just plain wrong. Collectively I’ve called them Anti-Patterns, and in this session you’ll get to see some of my favorites (or, anti-favorites).
Escaping the Try..Finally..Free Nest
We all want to do the right thing with memory management and make sure we tidy up after ourselves. However as our code gets buried in successive layers of object allocation, try, finally, free “nests” it all becomes a bit onerous and, well, resembling a pterodactyl nest. In this session, we look at a technique to flatten out your code so that it will look less attractive as habitation for a friendly pterosaur, and as a side benefit, improve readability. Along the way we use interfaces, generics and anonymous methods to build our over-engineered object de-allocation artifice.
Become Your Own Art Department
Finding suitable and consistent images for buttons, menus and splash screens can be a difficult task – why not make your own?
Alister is a brilliant developer and great instructor. He always does great work. We are very pleased to have him as our MVP of the week.