Mega Code Archive

Getting Delphi3000.com News in Delphi 2005

Title: Getting Delphi3000.com News in Delphi 2005 Question: Delphi 2005 introduces a new Welcome Page which can optionally display different news feeds. The default feeds show however, are all directly from Borland, CodeCentral and their Blogs. Hidden away are a few more interessting news feeds. Answer: Note: So far, there is no option on Delphi 3000 to select Delphi 2005 as product. I'll update this listing as soon as D3K gives me the options ;-) The "as is" of the Welcome Page When starting Delphi 2005 you'll be greeted with the new Welcome Page. This Welcome Page has finally undergone more developement and received some more attention then before. It optionally let's you choose between different news feeds to be displayed. Those will be downloaded as Delphi is started. However, the default news feeds displayed are "just" Borland News and their Main Aggregated Feed of the current Blogs. Yes, that's great, yet it would be nice to have more options. The default news options Enabling hidden featured RSS feeds Well, Borland does ship more options, including the Delphi 3000 RSS feed, they are just hidden away. It is easy to activate those RSS feeds. Locate your Borland Delphi installiation folder and go to the Welcome Page XML files folder, usually somewhere here: C:\Program Files\Borland\BDS\3.0\Welcomepage\xml\ Locate the file defaultProviders.xml, make a backup copy and open the file in notepad. There are two places with hidden news feed options. Simply remove the comment identifiers (each is there twice in the beginning of a line) and save the file back to disk. One group is shown here, remove the red displayed markers and save the file: The XML in Notepad Now, reload the Welcome Page and use the new options. I have attached a different XML File that you may load into your Delphi installation. It is extended to show more blogs of Delphi developers inside and outside of Borland and yet shows all default Borland entries. Have fun editing your file. The extended news options with Delphi 3000 loaded For Web Site Owners If you have published your RSS feed and expect Delphi developers to use it, you may be interessted to know how often it is pulled. Well, Borland thought of this and has changed the user agent string, so look in your logs for: Borland Delphi 2005 - Welcome Page Delphi.Personality 9.0 Each entry indicates a successful download of your RSS feed from the Delphi Welcome Page. Regards, Daniel "sakura" Wischnewski P.S.: Do you feel your feed should be included in my replacement file? Simple post its address here and I'll check it out :)