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Just for the record: <span style="font-weight: bold;">this is <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> scary!<br /><br /></span>Delphi is nice and simple to use, and although regarded as a cop-out by some elite-ists, is an incredibly powerful tool for creating nice pretty Win32 applications (And also some Linux ones too now, see <a href="http://www.borland.com/kylix/" title="kylix home">kylix</a>).<br />Even if your final program is not going to be written in Delphi (or rather, Object Orientated Pascal), then you can create working mock-ups in a very short amount of time using Delphi.<br /><br />But more to the point, its what some coursework is done in :-P<br /><br />So; some links to get started:<br /><br /><ul><li><a href="http://www.borland.com/delphi/" title="Delphi Home">Borland Delphi Home</a></li><li><a href="http://www.borland.com/products/downloads/download_delphi.html" title="Download it! Get going!">Download Free edition</a></li><li><a href="http://www.swissdelphicenter.ch/en/" title="Swiss Delphi Center/re (English)">Tips and Forums</a> site (Very Useful)</li></ul><h1>What is going on?</h1>OK, so you have been to the download link, got your registration key and installed it. But WTF is it?<br />Well, its an IDE (Integrated Developer Environment) which basically means its got all the tools you need to go forth and write some amazing programs :-D<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">So what </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">has</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> it got?</span><br /><ul><li>An Editor, with text highlighting (so you aren't staring at what may as well be notepad)</li><li>A Compiler (so that your code will be turned into something which is executable)</li><li>A Debugger (to find the errors, help you trace variables [we'll get to this later] etc...)</li><li>Code Insight! (This is amazing, more on this later but basically its for lazy bums like me who cant be bothered to type more than 3 characters at a time!)</li><li>GUI interface (Always useful on the eyes after 5 hours solid on intravenous caffeine)</li><li>GUI Previews/WYSIWYG (So you can see what your program will look like before you compile it)</li><li>A todo list for forgetful.. uh.. (Ho ho ho.)</li><li>Objects Panel (To quickly select and add Components [more on which later])<br /></li><li>Object Inspector (To edit the properties of said components and implement their methods)<br /></li></ul>And much more funky little bits that I've probably forgotten about, but thats the main stuff.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Well? What the hell </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">are</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> all these bits?</span><br style="font-weight: bold;" /><br style="font-weight: bold;" />A nice little graphical walkthrough...<br /><br /><span style="text-decoration: underline;">The Editor</span>:<br /><img width="696" vspace="0" hspace="0" height="482" border="0" alt="The Delphi Editor" src="/pictures/delphEd.jpg" /><br /><br /><span style="text-decoration: underline;">The Compiler</span>:<br />You dont really see this.. it just exists, trust me ;)<br /><br /><span style="text-decoration: underline;">The Debugger</span>:<br /><img src="/pictures/delphBugger.JPG" /><br /><br /><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Code Insight</span> (yay!):<br /><img src="/pictures/delphCodeIns.JPG" /><br /><br /><span style="text-decoration: underline;">GUI Interface</span>:<br />This really is self-explainatory. You can see from the images that its not text based... but below is a nice WYSIWYG form for you to look at too...<br /><br /><span style="text-decoration: underline;">WYSIWYG</span> (What You See Is What You Get):<br />An example from my Graphics coursework :P<br /><img src="/pictures/delphWYSIWYG.JPG" /><br /><br /><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Objects Panel</span>:<br /><img src="/pictures/delphObjectP.JPG" /><br /><br /><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Object Inspector</span>:<br /><img src="/pictures/delphObjectI.JPG" /><br /><br />And thats an overview of the main parts of Delphi. Just to get you into the terminology and such. More on what they do etc shortly...<br /><br /><h6><a href="mailto:stringfellow@sucs.org" title="email Steve P">stringfellow</a> made this page.</h6><br />