Last week I sent an urgent package to our immigration lawyers in San Francisco. Since it was so urgent, I needed to find out the second she got the package so I could call her and go over my green card papers over the phone.

So what did I do? Well, first off I made sure I kept the FedEx stub with my tracking number - 496054180486.

I could have just kept reloading this URL all morning... ;-)

But I have Delphi 6! So I decided to go to xmethods.net. I knew that they must have FedEx listed as a Web Service, and of course they do - here's the WSDL for FedEx's tracking service.

The first thing I had to do was import that WSDL, and Delphi 6 has a wizard for that. It makes life really easy for me.

The wizard generated this code for me:

CodeInsight makes my life even easier. I hardly have to know what a Web Service is:

Here's my finished code. Is that only one line?

Here's the form.

Here's the running app. As you can see, my lawyer got the package at 9:18am, and her and I were discussing the contents of the package at 9:19am... ;-)

To bad the INS doesn't have a web service. I stood in line from 4:45am last Friday and had my EAD card in hand 7 hours and 15 minutes later. There were 120 other people in line before me. I get my "Advance Parole" on 5/22 so that I can travel to Sweden on 5/24.

Stay tuned for more...