Idle Musings of a Delphi Junkie

This week I discovered the Google Deskbar. Very nice.

As Google is one of my most indepensibile resources (particularly Google Groups), it is great to have such easy access seemlessly integrated into my Taskbar. It comes with a set of pre-defined searches, but these can be removed, and custom ones can easily be added. Below are some of the ones I use :-


Delphi Newsgroups
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q={1}&btnG=Search&meta=group%3Dborland.public.delphi.*

SQL Server Newsgroups
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q={1}&btnG=Search&meta=group%3Dmicrosoft.public.sqlserver

.NET Framework Newsgroups
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q={1}&btnG=Search&meta=group%3Dmicrosoft.public.dotnet

And now for a shameless plug :-)

I've also developed an OTAPI add-in for the C#Builder IDE which integrates Google web and newsgroup searching into the IDE. It also has basic spell checking functionality. The newsgroup searching comes with a set of pre-defined Borland newsgroups which can be used to restrict searches by, but these can be customized. It also exposes a basic API to allow other newsgroup archives to be supported. There is a plug-in for the Tamaracka archives included to show how to implement this. It's written in C# but I do have plans to port it to Delphi for .NET.