1. The Developers Group http://www.richplum.net
20th September, 2005 Meeting
POSK, Hammersmith
Group Leader Brian Long

2. Agenda
1:00 - 2:00 – Welcome, News & Problem Clinic
2:00 - 2:45 – How To Write User Documentation Mike Unwalla
2:45 - 3:05 – Tea/coffee & biscuits
3:05 – 4:05 – Pete’s Home Videos (and Windows Media Centre) Pete Sykes

3. Agenda
4:05 - 4:10 – Brief fidget break
4:10 - 4:55 – Spreadsheet Components In Applications Steve Wilcox
4:55 - 5:00 – Brief Fidget Break
5:00 - 6:00 – Delphi and OpenGL – an Introduction to 3D Graphics Christopher Gold and Maciek Dakowicz

4. News 24 Hours of Delphi BDNRadio event held on 13th July
Many Delphi luminaries involved
Official recordings of all sessions available at:
0,1410,33109,00.html

5. News BDNRadio – 3 “channels” available around the clock
All interviews from 24 Hours of Delphi broadcast: mms://bdntv.borland.com/delphi24hrs
All Delphi content: mms://bdntv.borland.com/delphi
All Java content: mms://bdntv.borland.com/java

6. News
Delphi for .NET Compact Framework Technology Preview available now!
Delphi 2005 registered users area: downloads/registered/ download_delphi.html
Tutorial posted by David Clegg on BDN: 0,1410,33109,00.html

7. News Next meeting on Tuesday, October 17th at Microsoft, Reading
Topics to include
ECO II
PocketPC interaction
RemObjects
ADO.NET 2
And more besides
Full agenda available at:

8. News ASP.NET Security Best Practices Masterclass with Michael Li
October 3rd, Microsoft Office, Soho

9. News
PDC is over
However all the slides are online: downloads.aspx

10. News The second DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper day is coming.
Scheduled for October 22nd
To be held at Microsoft office, Reading
To contain 30 minute and minute sessions

11. News
Windows Longhorn* was officially renamed on 22nd July to Windows Vista:
Indigo is now called WCF (Windows Communication Foundation): connected
Avalon is now called WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation): experience * Note: Longhorn code name not original...

12. News (Vista cont.)
The UX (user experience) guidelines are called AERO:
Authentic
Energetic
Reflective
Open
Direct3D10 is now called WGF 2.0 (Windows Graphics Foundation 2.0)

13. News
Subsequent versions of Delphi, starting with DeXter, will at last support Microsoft Active Accessibility
ActionBands have had MSAA support added, which trickles through to the IDE

14. News
Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 launch date announced as 7th November 2005
.NET 2.0 (aka Whidbey) will implicitly be launched on the same date

15. News
Microsoft e-Learning is offering free 90 day subscriptions to eLearning courses on VS2005 and SQL 2005 until 8 November 2005.
visualstudio2005

16. News
Altova have released their XML engines (as used in XMLSpy et al) for free download:
AltovaXML2005 includes engines for:
XML validating parser
XSLT 1.0
XSLT 2.0 (schema-aware)
XQuery 1.0
Can be accessed from:
Command line
COM interfaces
Java interfaces
.NET interfaces

17. News VoIP is clearly big business
eBay is to buy Skype ( for $2.6 billion (!!!)

18. News Add ICE entry to your mobile phone contact database
In Case of Emergency
For multiple contacts add ICE, ICE2, ICE3, etc.
N.B. The recent that claimed this was a spoof was a spoof

19. News Having a walk outdoors in nice weather makes you feel good
It’s a fact!
DyeHard/story?id=223505&page=1

20. News
Warning! Wear a hard hat if you are planning on going to Oxford

21. News