OK, so it doesn't have the same ring as Eminem's song, but it is accurate. I was going through some of the older sections of my hard drive looking to reorganize and cleanup unwanted files. While I was doing that, I came across a project, TerraService, that I did ages ago. To the best of my recollection, it may have been ported from a VB application that I found somewhere on MSDN, but a search on that site isn't turning up any positive hits. Sorry for any lack of proper attribution. If this was written by someone else in another language, let me know, and I'll give the proper credit.

The reason I'm making the Delphi source available is that it shows how Delphi has improved over the years. I originally wrote this application using Delphi 6. As a result, I had to manually deal with the TByteDynArray types to decode them from base64 before display. Using Delphi 2006, this is no longer necessary - the types come back decoded and in usable fashion without any extra work on your part. This sample shows several interesting concepts: stream to variant conversion, drawing tiled images, calling a webservice, dealing with GIF and JPG files, and interception of webservice traffic for debugging.

While I don't know which specific version of Delphi fixes the TByteDynArray/Base64 de/encoding, this much I know for certain: Delphi 2006 makes web services very easy to do.