Delphi and stuff

QC82143

2010-02-15T13:42:00.002+01:00

I've just submitted QC report 82143 about Controls.TWinControl.ControlAtPos not finding nested child controls.I've found the bug (it seems) when trying to answer this question on Stack Overflow.My suggested fix is included in the description of the report.

delphisvn updated to Subversion 1.5

2008-07-18T19:14:00.003+02:00

I've updated delphisvn to use Subversion 1.5.Good news that the official release now finally includes DLLs on Windows.There's only source code for now, a downloadable release will follow.

Code signing large executables

2007-10-17T17:40:00.000+02:00

I've been having some trouble signing some of my large (~1.8 GB!) executables. (In case you wonder, they contain a lot of multimedia content packed into a single file for downloading.)The Microsoft Authenticode tools (signcode.exe, signtool.exe) failed with error messages like "Not enough storage is available to process this command". I've also tried signing them programmatically, using the

SetToString, StringToSet

2007-10-17T10:48:00.000+02:00

The SetToString, StringToSet functions in TypInfo unit take PPropInfo as parameter which means you can only use them with set types for which RTTI (a published property) exists.Here are my versions which take PTypeInfo instead so you can use them with set types in general, even without a published property declared for the type:uses SysUtils, TypInfo;function GetOrdValue(Info: PTypeInfo; const

QC48959

2007-07-12T17:24:00.000+02:00

I've submitted QC report 48959, titled "TCustomProvider destructor does not call UnregisterProvider".In TCustomProvider.Destroy there's some code which assumes that Owner is still assigned during destruction. This, however, is not the case if the provider is being destroyed implicitly because of ownership.Typically, you put provider components directly on your remote data module in which case

DataSnap to the rescue

2007-06-09T19:29:00.000+02:00

I'm maintaining a custom setup program used to install applications. In some cases it needs to perform actions which require administrative privileges, e.g. writing into Program Files directory, or modifying the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.On Windows Vista, the privileges can be acquired by elevation. However, elevation actually switches the user context; but the setup program also needs to

QC45527

2007-05-05T08:35:00.000+02:00

I've submitted QC report 45527 about a small, probably infrequently encountered issue with TCheckListBox: when themes are not used and you're using the Flat style, horizontal scrolling sometimes causes the checkboxes not to be redrawn properly.Attached to the report are more details, screenshots and a sample project.The problem somehow seems to be related to setting the clipping region in

The missing Import Component Wizard in Turbo Delphi (Win32)

2006-12-22T11:48:00.000+01:00

Apparently the Import Component and View Type Library wizards are not enabled in Turbo Delphi (Win32) by default.A workaround has been posted on the newsgroups:Create an empty file named: ATLBASE.H in this directory: $(BDS)\include\atl\

The missing ActiveX Control Wizard

2006-12-18T19:59:00.000+01:00

The ActiveX Control Wizard is missing in Delphi 2006 by default.You can bring it back by adding the following string value in the registry:[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Borland\BDS\4.0\Type Library]"ActiveXWizard"="True"I've just found it in a comment to QC25012.Also see Delphi 2006 Hidden COM Registry Entries.Regmon reveals another missing registry entry, "InteropCheck"="True", also mentioned here.

Don't mistake SyncEdit for Refactoring ;-)

2006-12-08T14:41:00.000+01:00

Don't mistake Delphi's SyncEdit for Refactoring. (In case you wonder what SyncEdit is, it's invoked by pressing Ctrl+Shift+J on a selected text in the editor. Works in Delphi 2005 and higher.)By doing so I've just introduced a rather obscure bug in my code which took me a while to recognize. ;-)When using SyncEdit, be aware that you're simply doing a search/replace within the selected block of

The 2006 Delphi Survey

2006-12-01T16:00:00.000+01:00

Here's your chance to let CodeGear know what you would like to see in future versions of Delphi:English version (direct link)BDN article with links to various language versions

New default timeouts in IE7 wininet

2006-11-19T11:39:00.000+01:00

The new wininet.dll which comes with Internet Explorer 7 uses new default timeouts:INTERNET_OPTION_SEND_TIMEOUT30000 msINTERNET_OPTION_RECEIVE_TIMEOUT30000 ms The good news is that you can now override these values by calling the InternetSetOption API (zero value seems to indicate infinite wait, see this example).In previous versions, InternetSetOption didn't work but at least the default values

CodeGear

2006-11-15T20:35:00.000+01:00

CodeGear := TCompany.Create;Congratulations and best wishes! Kick into high gear! :-)

delphisvn for Delphi 7

2006-11-07T09:40:00.000+01:00

Here are some screenshots of delphisvn for Delphi 7 which I'm working on. Some people have asked for it. I rarely use Delphi 7 anymore and I'm doing it just for fun. I expect to release it within a few days.Update: The release is now available at SourceForge.

delphisvn: updated to Subversion 1.4.0

2006-09-26T09:15:00.000+02:00

delphisvn now includes Subversion 1.4.0 client DLL. It can still use the previous (Subversion 1.3.2) client DLL.Note: Using the Subversion 1.4.0 client library may automatically upgrade your working copy format which will make your working copy directories unusable by pre-1.4.0 clients.For more information, see Subversion 1.4.0 Release Notes.I've just upgraded my home computer to use Subversion

Delphi Wiki

2006-07-24T22:18:00.000+02:00

A Delphi Wiki has been started on http://delphi.wikia.com. I think it's a brilliant idea and I hope it takes off well and becomes a great community resource. So please also spread the word to other Delphi developers.

Shenoy's PInvoke Live Template

2006-07-12T12:37:00.000+02:00

Shenoy has written a great example of a live template extension. It uses PInvoke web service from the PInvoke.net website. For Delphi code, it also uses the BabelCode web service to translate the declaration to Delphi (since PInvoke.net only returns C# and perhaps VB.NET code, I think).So, you're writing a .NET app and need to make a PInvoke call to some unmanaged Win32 API? With this live

Blame

2006-07-01T03:18:00.000+02:00

A few people have asked me if I plan to include Subversion blame functionality.Here's a screenshot which shows what I've done:Running blame may take a long time, especially with a file with a lot of history, so I wrote it to run in a separate thread.The hint shows the commit log message of the blame line revision.

delphisvn

2006-06-22T00:07:00.000+02:00

I've started to prepare the Subversion stuff I've blogged about here for release as open source.I've submitted project registration to Sourceforge. The project, if approved, will be called delphisvn and will be released under Mozilla Public License 1.1.Update: Yay, I've just uploaded the initial release to SourceForge! :-)

More Subversion

2006-06-21T19:31:00.000+02:00

In the recent few days, I've been able to spare some time for my Subversion IDE plugin again. I've written a dockable IDE form which can be used to perform some actions and view their results. If you're interested in how to write a dockable IDE form, see Corbin's article and example. Who knows, perhaps this plugin might actually become useful one day ;-)See for yourself, in the screenshots

Subversion editor view

2006-04-05T23:48:00.000+02:00

Today I've played with the idea of a new Subversion editor view in the Delphi 2006 IDE.To add a new editor view to the editor, you have to implement ICustomEditorView interface and register it with a RegisterEditorView call.You'll need to add EditorViewSupport unit to your uses clause. This unit is only available through designide.dcp; there is no source code. But you can use Code Insight and

XMLDoc regions CC#23955

2006-03-22T09:48:00.000+01:00

In response to a comment here on this blog, I've uploaded source code of my XMLDoc regions plugin to Code Central.I hope you'll find it useful.

Help Insight

2006-03-08T12:06:00.000+01:00

I like Help Insight in Delphi 2006. I think it's going to prove to be very useful. The cool thing is that it's customizable: the popup window is a browser view of an HTML page generated from the XML compiler output by applying HelpInsight.xsl and HelpInsight.css files located in your $(BDS)\Objrepos directory.If you want to have a look at what the XML compiler output looks like, you can modify

XML Documentation in Delphi 2006

2006-03-03T14:58:00.000+01:00

Delphi 2006 compiler supports an option to generate XML representation of your source code which can be processed (using XSLT) to produce, for example, HTML or HTML Help output.To associate a piece of your own documentation with a class or method, you can simply put your comments directly before its declaration. The compiler will copy them into a separate node in the XML output.Another

Subversion in my Delphi IDE

2006-02-28T22:34:00.000+01:00

Subversion in my Delphi IDEFor over a year, I've been using Subversion version control software to manage my source code, with TortoiseSVN as client on Windows. I find TortoiseSVN extremely helpful in my everyday work. It's implemented as a Windows shell extension (so it's integrated with Windows Explorer) which makes it very comfortable to use.For the last couple of days, I've been trying to

Delphi 2006 Demo

2006-02-23T14:05:00.000+01:00

There's a nice new demo on Borland's website showing features of Delphi 2006:Delphi® 2006 - The First Choice in Windows Development

CC2209 fix

2006-02-06T17:13:00.000+01:00

I've just fixed a memory leak in my entry #2209, titled "Access client's IP address from a DataSnap remote data module" on Borland's CodeCentral.The problem was on the COM server side, in the included DSnapCom unit. The client's IP address (passed in by httpsrvr.dll or scktsrvr.exe as an additional BSTR parameter) was not released properly, which caused a few bytes of memory leak for each method

Erik's OpenTools FAQ

2006-01-22T13:24:00.000+01:00

I've just noticed that Erik's OpenTools API FAQ and Resources web page links to my CodeCentral entry as an example on getting the target executable's file name from Delphi. Cool! :-)Note that you only need this for Delphi version 7 or earlier; newer versions already expose TargetName property.

Free Threaded Marshaler

2006-01-14T00:17:00.000+01:00

When writing a DataSnap appserver, you should probably try to make it thread-safe and register it to use the multi-threaded apartment (MTA) model (ThreadingModel = tmFree) because it gives you total control over synchronization and optimization of your code. But writing thread-safe code also requires more work. In some cases, it may be useful to register your appserver to use the single-threaded

Installing Delphi 2006

2005-12-16T10:32:00.000+01:00

A few days ago, I received my shiny, fresh, the latest and greatest Delphi 2006 in a beautiful package. Very exciting! With much regret, I had to put it aside because I was busy at work and I simply didn't have time to play with it yet. I put it on my table, and I squinted at it occasionally while working on my current project using Delphi 7.Then yesterday evening I finally got around to giving

Could not find server in ObjectManager list

2005-09-14T18:52:00.000+02:00

You can register your DataSnap appserver as stateless by calling RegisterPooled in the overriden UpdateRegistry class method of your remote data module.The problem with the way httpsrvr.dll manages stateless objects is that, ehm, it's stateful. ;-) More precisely, it's stateless only within a single IIS session.The Object Manager uses a stringlist of class IDs and each item contains a list of

Hallvard's Blog: The ultimate Delphi IDE start-up hack

2005-08-13T09:57:00.000+02:00

Hallvard's Blog: The ultimate Delphi IDE start-up hack Petr Vones has written a hack (a patch for rtlxx.bpl) to turn off duplicate unit checking which will improve Delphi IDE start-up speed. If you're going to use the patch, be careful - make sure that the packages which you load into your Delphi IDE do not contain duplicate units.

10 Years of Delphi

2005-02-09T07:26:00.000+01:00

10 Years of DelphiBDNradio: The Creation of DelphiHappy birthday! :-)

HTTPSRVR with Apache

2005-02-08T00:05:00.000+01:00

Interesting: HTTPSRVR with Apache. On Windows only, of course. I should try it when I find the time.

Interop Wiki

2004-11-20T09:50:00.000+01:00

Just stumbled upon this interop reference web site. It's a wiki containing:API signatures and type definitionsgotchas, tips and samplesalternative managed APIsother community resourcesIt only works in Internet Explorer at the moment.

Are you game?

2004-11-05T16:38:00.000+01:00

Cool Delphi 2005 wallpaper ;-)

madCodeHook

2004-10-14T21:12:00.000+02:00

I'm using madCodeHook from madCollection to fix an ugly problem we (at the company I work for) have with some of the earlier versions of our products. We've been using JCL (the JEDI Code Library, an otherwise extremely useful and very well-written library), which used to have a bug in its CPU speed measuring code: it might cause a division by zero on faster computers. What makes things really bad

Delphi 2005 press release

2004-10-12T21:00:00.000+02:00

Scotts Valley, Calif. - October 12, 2004: Borland Software (NASDAQ: NM: BORL) today announced Borland® Delphi™ 2005, previously codenamed "Diamondback" and the newest version of Borland's Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment for Windows® and .NET applications. Delphi 2005 combines Win32, .NET, Delphi and C# support all within one environment, significantly advances developer and team

DataSnap.NET

2004-10-12T01:09:00.000+02:00

About a week ago, I had an idea of porting the server part of DataSnap framework to .NET. Since then I've been fiddling with it in my free time, using Borland's C#Builder Personal Edition which is free for non-commercial development. Today, my first prototype of a (stateful) managed socket server is ready. So far, it's able to serve the following requests:asGetAppServers: retrieve ProgIDs of

Programmer's Litany

2004-10-06T21:28:00.000+02:00

I see the truth of it ;-)

Delphi 8 Tips, Tricks and Speed Improvements

2004-09-30T01:52:00.000+02:00

Cool article by Corbin Dunn. He also has a cool treehouse ;-)

Client dataset to .NET dataset

2004-09-27T21:05:00.000+02:00

CC #21053: A great Delphi 8 project with source code written by Petr Vones. It can load a client dataset XML datapacket into a .NET dataset.

Multicast events

2004-09-26T22:20:00.000+02:00

I like multicast events in Microsoft .NET. Basically, a single event property (using Delphi terms) can be linked to multiple event handlers (as opposed to standard Delphi's events which can only be linked to a single event handler at most). In Delphi 7, a multicast technique is already used internally in TApplicationEvents, AppEvnts unit. In this case, the result is that you can have multiple

Undocumented Delphi IDE command line switch

2004-09-22T16:03:00.000+02:00

Another newsgroup nugget from Allen Bauer on b.p.d.n-t: One thing you can do with all versions of Delphi from at least D5, is use the "-r" command-line switch. This allows you to specify the root registry key to use when loading the IDE. For instance in D7, you could export the HKCU\Software\Borland\Delphi key to a file. Then rename the "Delphi" key to something else, like "SafeMode".

Just a part of it, please (part 2)

2004-09-20T16:05:00.000+02:00

For performance reasons, I have rewritten the ISAPI extension DLL (see my previous post) which simulates HTTP 1.1 GET with range specified. The DLL now uses the IIS function HSE_REQ_TRANSMIT_FILE which is asynchronous and performance-wise optimized for sending files to clients. Note: It helps to specify the FILE_FLAG_SEQUENTIAL_SCAN flag when opening the file. For asynchronous I/O operations, the

CC #22334

2004-09-20T11:26:00.000+02:00

Today I posted two performance counter libraries for instrumenting DataSnap appservers (one for sockets, one for HTTP transport) to CodeCentral.

Visual Poetry

2004-09-20T08:26:00.000+02:00

Written in Delphi. Cool!

CC #22332

2004-09-18T16:39:00.000+02:00

Today I posted an example of creating a custom performance counter library to CodeCentral. I'm preparing my DataSnap performance libraries for publishing as well.

YAPP

2004-09-04T16:58:00.000+02:00

I'm using YAPP (Yet Another Pretty Printer ;-)) written by John Kaster to format my Delphi source code for HTML. The current version can highlight the following languages: C++C#Delphi (of course!) ;-)JavaSQLDelphi forms (.dfm)OMG IDLMicrosoft IDLXbase It can produce highlighted output in HTML or RTF. Quite useful. Thanks, John!

Just a part of it, please

2004-09-04T13:03:00.000+02:00

A few days ago, I had to write an ISAPI extension DLL which would return partial content from a local file stored on the web server. This was meant as a workaround for some proxy configurations which (so I heard) strip some HTTP headers and thus make it impossible for our client code to simply use standard HTTP 1.1 GET requests with the Range header specified. (And before you ask, no, it was not

Unicode Identifiers

2004-09-04T09:21:00.000+02:00

News from Danny Thorpe about Unicode identifiers. My personal and purely subjective note: I just hope I will never have to read source code containing non-English (e.g. Chinese) identifiers. I'm not a native English speaker but I shudder even when I think about source code containing identifiers in my own native language. Yuck! Am I too old already? ;-)

GExperts 1.2 released

2004-09-04T09:03:00.000+02:00

Building packages from the command line

2004-09-03T22:13:00.000+02:00

Allen Bauer has posted this little newsgroup nugget on b.p.d.n-t: The IDE supports a very little know feature where you can continue to control these options while in the IDE, yet allow the command-line be able to also control the options. In a package file, all the options listed there are propagated to all the contained units. This is different than a normal .dpr program/library file

PerfMon ready

2004-09-02T23:36:00.000+02:00

My DataSnap appserver is now instrumented. In fact, my performance counter libraries are generic and will work with all DataSnap servers installed on the computer. DataSnap class IDs are read from the registry and a separate performance object instance is created per each class ID.I have created two performance counter DLLs, one for web (httpsrvr.dll) and another for socket (scktsrvr.exe)

Delphi Meetup

2004-08-14T14:18:00.000+02:00

I've signed in to in Munich, Germany.

See the next Delphi release at BorCon 2004

2004-08-06T11:00:00.000+02:00

In-depth details on DiamondBack, the code name for the next Delphi release, will be shown throughout BorCon 2004. If you use Delphi, you'll want to be there! See the original BDN article by John Kaster.

First attempts in .NET

2004-08-02T00:57:00.000+02:00

At home, I have a DSL connection which gets a different IP address every time I connect so I sometimes use the free dynamic DNS service. To update your registered DynDNS hostname with your current IP address, you need to send it a simple HTTP request conforming to their published specs. I've been using a small tool I'd written to automate this task, using Delphi (of course!) and Indy with OpenSSL

CC #22009

2004-07-27T21:55:00.000+02:00

Today I posted to Borland's CodeCentral an example which shows a possible way to access client IP address from a DataSnap remote data module.

My Delphi Tools

2004-07-19T18:47:00.000+02:00

Here's list of tools I often use from my Delphi IDE (menu Tools\Configure Tools): Title: Explore &Target Directory Program: explorer.exe Working Dir: Parameters: /e,/select, $EXENAME Title: Explore &Source Directory Program: explorer.exe Working Dir: Parameters: /e,/select, $EDNAME Title: Open Source in &Notepad2 Program: C:\Program Files\Notepad2\Notepad2.exe Working Dir: Parameters: $EDNAME

Failure is rare

2004-07-19T17:00:00.000+02:00

A quote from MSDN: "There is no indication of success or failure. Failure is rare. There is no extended error information for this function; do not call GetLastError." I think this gem should be archived for future generations ;-) It's an excerpt from documentation of CharLower API function.

QC #8664

2004-07-19T10:20:00.000+02:00

I've just posted this report to Borland's QualityCentral. Under certain circumstances, httpsrvr.dll may make one additional, superfluous call to ReadClient after all data has already been read. In such case, the call will time out after 60 seconds. Only happens if the client request content length is so big (from my tests, >48K) that it has to be read in chunks.

TNT Unicode controls

2004-07-18T19:08:00.000+02:00

Found them today mentioned on the newsgroups... interesting idea!

Localizing Borland runtime packages

2004-07-16T16:21:00.000+02:00

Today, I saw someone on a Czech Delphi mailing list saying that it's not possible to localize Borland runtime packages using Delphi's built-in Translation Manager. Well, it certainly is possible; all you have to do is create a package project with the same structure (ie. containing the same units) as the target package. The easiest way to create such a package is to let the Delphi IDE generate

More silence

2004-07-06T22:22:00.000+02:00

My shoulder needs surgery :-( I'm going to the hospital tomorrow. Should be back home on Friday, if everything goes well. The right arm will be fixated again. Oh my. More pain. More one-hand typing... Grrrrr.

From the Interbase trenches

2004-06-30T01:09:00.000+02:00

Well, it seems that select ... from my_proc(my_params, ...) join my_table on ... can be much slower than putting the code into a separate stored procedure and simply selecting * from it. Optimizer confused? Oh well, I have to investigate some more, but some of my selects now run 6x faster... which is a good thing (TM) ;-) Also, requesting plan on some complex queries (with a large plan) seems

Back

2004-06-26T19:40:00.000+02:00

Long time no post... I had an accident on in-line skates, my right arm was dislocated from my shoulder. It hurts but it's getting better slowly, at least I can type with both hands, finally.

Victory report ;-)

2004-05-21T00:48:00.000+02:00

cd /pub tonight ;-)5 kennies down ;-)

Failure report ;-)

2004-05-20T17:44:00.000+02:00

I had an idea to create a Delphi IDE add-in that would use existing IDE highlighters (hint: IOTAHighlighter interface declared in ToolsAPI unit) to convert source code currently open in the editor (or perhaps just selected lines) into an HTML page with highlighted syntax. The style/color codes could be read from the registry, thus respecting your current IDE settings.Today I tried to do it but I

initial commenting

2004-05-16T10:13:00.000+02:00

Writeln('Hello, world!'); Welcome to my Delphi blog. Hope you enjoy it here.