Wizard Software – All things Delphi (and some PHP)

I can write programs, play a little with Photoshop, but when it comes to graphics, man I suck! I’m always looking for cool icons, bitmaps and images to include in my software. It’s an amusing fact of a programmers life that most people barely care if what you write actually works, just so long as it looks good!  I came across the following site recently and I’ve been using some of the images and icons in my new upcoming CPU speed software.

http://www.vistaicons.com/

The icons and other images resources are free and quality is pretty good. Take a look.

graphics

Indy version 10. Must hold the title for world’s most unfriendly Delphi/comms help files and documentation! Thanks to Google (and René Laursen from TeamB), I’ve been able to code-up some TCP comms in a few hours which otherwise might have taken a few days. But, thanks Indy! Those components are truly great.

http://www.indyproject.org/

Delphi sockets, tcp

I’ve had many problems using the IXMLDocument object, mostly related to different versions of the .net redistributable installed on different machines. So, I wrote a short function that extracts a node value from the passed XML string:

function GetNodeVal(sNode, sXML : string) : string ;
{This function extracts the specified xml node's value from the XML string}

var
  iPos : integer ;
  sValue : string ;

begin
  iPos := Pos('<'+ sNode + '>', sXML) ;

  if iPos = 0 then
  begin
    iPos := Pos('<'+ Lowercase(sNode) + '>', sXML) ;

    if iPos = 0 then
    begin
      result := 'Error:Globals.GetNodeVal' ;
      exit ;
    end;
  end;

  sValue := Copy(sXML, iPos + 2 + Length(sNode), 255) ;

  iPos := Pos('</' + sNode + '>', sValue) ;

  if iPos = 0 then
  begin
    iPos := Pos('</'+ Lowercase(sNode) + '>', sValue) ;

    if iPos = 0 then
    begin
      result := 'Error:Globals.GetNodeVal' ;
      exit ;
    end;
  end;

  sValue := Copy(sValue, 1, iPos -1) ;
  result := sValue ;
end;

Delphi code