Readers Respond: What Was Your First (Not a "Hello World" Type) Delphi Application?

A "hello world" would typically print out a "hello world" on a display device. The simplest hello world application in Delphi would be "ShowMessage('Hello World');"

After a few "hello world" programs, you would start building your fist non-trivial application.

Do you remember what was the first application you created in Delphi (what version, year)?

All in Delphi 1

It was an interface software that permits to program a radio (list of frequency, mode etc...). The software communicates with the radio on a com port... Ah, the good old days, :)

—Guest TacTicToe

monopoly

after learning about the basics, I wrote monopoly, a simple game, using the andorra 2d engine in order to display the animations...

—Guest lenzi

Wallpaper Changer

My Firts Delphi Aplication was a simple wallpaper changer, I wrote it in delphi 1 and later ported to delphi 2 and 3 without big changes. Nice little lovely project.

—Guest PHereira

My First Real App

It was an exam generating program, which built multi-choice, fill in blanks digital exams. I did not know how to do rubber band style selections but it did what we wanted it to do. It was modeled after a program that MS used internally to create exams.

—jblack741

Temperature logger

After having headache with Labwiew I switched to Delphi and created a hardware supported system for logging temperatures in an industrial system. It is still in use by many people. http://www.elektronik.si/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10713

—Guest aly

MEAT -- I got my teeth into Delphi

This happened many years ago (in a faraway ...) when I was an application developer at the Big Airplane Company (BAC). I was attached to Manufacturing Engineering/Planning in the SheetMetal division. For years I'd been maintaining Interactive Plan Generator, a process plan authoring system that a co-worker and I had cooked up back in the mid-80s, in Turbo Pascal under DOS. Well, here I was with a brand new copy of "Grandson of Turbo Pascal" a/k/a Delphi. So I decided to cut my teeth with an attempt to bring IPG into the Brave New World using Delphi. I created a basic form type and subclassed it for Detail Plans and Tool Orders, created classes for the plan and tool order structured data, built treeviews to replace IPG's old menu heirarchy, and a whole lot else. The result I called Manufacturing Engineering Authoring Tool (MEAT). Alas, it was never to see the light of day, as our bosses were in the midst of "Paradigm Shift du Jour" and decided IPG & Co. were too "old school". (Sigh)

—olgreyfox

Construction Estimating - a long tale

I had evolved a construction estimating program from spreadsheets to dBase script, and later compiled in Clipper. I rewrote the project in 2000 (fearing the end of the world) using Delphi3. Then upgraded to Delphi5. Other projects include a Lien tracking program and an Appointment/Diary/Address program. I am a classic case of creating a very workable application and still knowing very little about programming.

—Guest Tom Higgins

Major Paradox Port

My first work with Delphi was porting a fairly large and complex gui/database/web-publishing application from Paradox 7 ObjectPAL to Delphi 3. Luckily I had a guy helping me who had used Delphi for a year or so, and the similarities between the languages also helped with the learning curve. Our product won several industry awards and sold almost 50K copies before we were driven into the ground by our silly Canadian overlords.

—Guest codevark

Adressbook

My first serious Delphi Application was an address book type application, which became an internal information system on customer addresses and phone numbers, then project information and customer-project relationships were added, finally it also became a time tracker. So it actually was the central information tool for the company I worked for back in the early 90th. The first ideas were drafted in Paradox and dbase, but with Delphi 1 I started the real thing :)

—Guest Olaf Monien

VB Refugee finds D6

I had used VB since it first came out; DOS then Windows versions. I was tired of MS products and knew a little of Delphi, but had never used it. A new client came my way looking for a order management system for their manufacturing business. I bought a copy of Delphi 6 and started reading the manuals. Six months later, we had a great system that's been going strong with continual upgrades since 2004. That really was my first Delphi program.

—Guest VB-Refugee

Tanzania Livestock Marketing Project

When I was still at school, Delphi 1 came out. As finishing project I and two friends built a database (Paradox tables) program with Delphi 1 to help Tanzania Government keep track of livestock prices.

—Guest Jens Fudge

Toolbook Extensions

My first program in Delphi 1 was a port of a feature extension for a project developed in Asymetrix Toolbook. This feature extension was originally written in Visual Basic and did replace all database features in Toolbook and added a lot more features that never could have been developed in Toolbook at this time. A lot of DDE communication and tricky IPC stuff involved. With the release of Delphi 5 we started to consolidate all the code in Delphi. The project was used for handling emergency situations (fire, collision, piracy etc.) on ships (container ships, tanker, ferries etc.) involving a lot of training features.

—Guest Fred Ahrens

Ancient history

Goodness, when was Delphi 1.0a first published? 1989 or something? Wasnt it called "Aspen"? Well, I recall I had to develop an an ICT-employee / client assignment application. Being a Clipper pro at that time, OOP pascal gave me quite a headache....

—Guest Rene vdL

Lot Tracking Application

My first Delphi app was an application to track our lots of goods as to who had deleted/modified/reprinted lot tickets.

—Guest Robert Smith

First Application

Database application for the city school system in Colorado. Application was used to keep track of all the equipment in the kitchen, from which school it is located in, date it was bought, dates of warranty, maintenance of each piece, etc...

—majlumbo