It was my pleasure presenting the power of TMS WEB Core in this year's Delphi Coding Bootcamp. In particular, I show how easy it is to create applications for the Web if you are a Delphi developer already used to writing desktop applications with the VCL.
Enjoy!
Abstract
Join this session by MVP and author Dr. Holger Flick to learn the fastest, easiest way to create powerful, fully working web apps with little or no code using skills you already have. Design the apps visually and with a click of a button get perfect HTML, CSS, and JavaScript created for you.
Converting strings to dates never seemed to be straightforward. First, specifying the source for all the different date component was difficult.
Second, if the conversion is unsuccessful and "no date" has been defined, it could not be expressed with TDate or TDateTime.
Possible solutions for both issues will be presented in this 5-Minute-Snack.
For the first time in years, TMS was able to celebrate Training Days in-person again! This year, TMS introduced us to the city of Bruges in Belgium. It was a wonderful event with a lot of opportunities for Delphi developers to mingle and exchange their knowledge.
Aside from the social events, there were lots of training sessions with valuable content.
Welcome to my new blog! Once again, it is time for an update. In the last 20 years, we have come a long way. It seems like yesterday I started blogging, but as this post will show, there is quite some history involved.
I started in November 2005 with my first blog on https://blogger.com called Holger's Thoughts on Delphi:
It was a great, no-cost alternative to publish on the internet at the time. There, I published my first code snippets about Delphi and .NET development. Also, my first video tutorials that I created for Borland were announced there.
After a while, a new, more modern, blog engine was needed. I also had stopped blogging on a regular basis because after college, I took on other challenges that kept my Delphi work to a minimum. Well, at the end of 2016, I decided to focus on Delphi again and WordPress delivered a new, modern blog engine with lots of other content. My internet provider offered web space with WordPress enabled. Thus, I could move my blog as well as all my other web content over to WordPress. However, WordPress has become more about design and web pages than blogging technical content. It no longer was the right tool for my technical articles.
Recently, I noticed that more and more developers used GitHub Pages to present their thoughts on the Web. I noticed much better search capabilities, automatically generated table of contents, and - most important of all - extraordinary code formatting.
Thus, I jumped right into the world of page publication with GitHub. My first endeavor I created with Jekyll and a special template for technical documentation. I was already providing a lot of the features desired. All additional content for my sessions for the TMS Days in Belgium was created using Jekyll and Markdown. However, it lacked one important part of every modern developer website: a blog! I was not going to move over to a solution that would not allow me to publish posts on a regular basis and send updates to the community.
While reading the documentation for Vapor, a server-side development tool using Swift, I noticed it was created with a tool called MkDocs. Just like Jekyll it allows you to generate documentation content using Markdown. Even better, there was an open-source project called Material for MkDocs which extended the theme and added dozens of plugins with hundreds of customization options. That turned out to be the winning combination!
Thus, I was able to create a complete workflow using only free tooling:
graph LR
A[Markdown] --> B[Material for MkDocs] --> C[GitHub] --> D[GitHub Pages]
A detailed list of the tools used:
Visual Studio Code
MkDocs
Material for MkDocs
Git
GitHub:
GitHub Repository
GitHub Pages
GitHub Workflows
All content is written in Markdown and each Git Push triggers a GitHub workflow which publishes the website. Really, after all these years, the best solution for a software developer.
In addition to the blog, I am able to create tutorials and code snippet posts ("snacks") that are much easier to find as they are not hidden in a blog post.
