The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for 2009

Welcome to Classic Shell: Classic Start Menu and Classic Explorer functions for Windows 7

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/12/31

One of the things in usability is to enable old skoop people that have been using.

Windows 7 went even further than Windows Vista into changing start menu functionality and explorer functionality that had been there since Windows 95.
So things that have been working for over a decade, suddenly stopped to work, or worse: work differently.

Would you imagine what happened when someone reordered the pedals in a car (from left to right are clutch, brake and throttle) or reassign their functionality?

So some people gathered and wrote Classic Shell.

Now someone please restrore the “backspace” keyboard behaviour back to “go one level up in the folder tree” as it had been for more than a decade…

–jeroen

Posted in Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Power User, Usability, User Experience (ux) | 4 Comments »

Anyone got the Delphi 2010 code formatter to work with anonymous methods?

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/12/24

With the default settings, the Delphi 2010 code formatter folds anonymous methods on one line.

Is there anyone who has found settings to circumvent this?
(You can also react on my Stackoverflow question here, I will update the blog with the relevant answers).

Original code:

procedure TUnit.AppendFinalization(const StringBuilder: TStringBuilder);
begin
  AppendMemberResults(StringBuilder,
    function(Member: TGeneratableInUnit): IStringListWrapper
    begin
      Result := Member.FinalizationText;
    end
  );
end;

procedure TUnit.AppendMemberResults(const StringBuilder: TStringBuilder; const GetMemberText: TFunc<TGeneratableInUnit, IStringListWrapper>);

Formatted code:

procedure TUnit.AppendFinalization(const StringBuilder: TStringBuilder);
begin
  AppendMemberResults(StringBuilder, function(Member: TGeneratableInUnit): IStringListWrapper begin Result := Member.FinalizationText; end);
end;

procedure TUnit.AppendMemberResults(const StringBuilder: TStringBuilder; const GetMemberText: TFunc<TGeneratableInUnit, IStringListWrapper>);

As you can see, the anonymous method is being formatted to one line.

I feel I’m missing some kind of setting here…

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2010, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

For Pre D2007 versions: CodeCentral 24535 Delphi SOAP Runtime and Importer Update

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/12/23

Had to use this on an old project, so I put this up as a reference (quite a few people have it, it was released late 2007 and I just put it up here as a reference for myself):
[WayBack] 24535 Delphi SOAP Runtime and Importer Update.

It contains the SOAP runtime and WSDL importer from Delphi 2007, but then compiled for Delphi  7, Delphi  2005 and Delphi  2006.
So if you have a project stuck in one of those old Delphi versions, you can use the SOAP/WSDL support from Delphi 2007.

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, SOAP/WebServices, Software Development | 1 Comment »

Delphi 2010 build numbers don’t tell you what you have installed

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/12/17

I applied update 4 and 5 and the boost update.
Since I didn’t know the exact state my Delphi 2010 was in, I watched the build numbers and the list of items in the Help About box.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Development | 11 Comments »

Delphi – MD5: the MessageDigest_5 unit has been there since Delphi 2007

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/12/11

I still see a lot of people crafting their own MD5 implementation.
A lot of the existing MD5 implementations do not work well in Delphi 2009 and later (because they need to be adapted to Unicode).
Many of those existing implementations behave differently if you pass the same ASCII characters as AnsiString or UnicodeString.

The MessageDigest_5 unit has been available in Delphi since Delphi 2007.
This is the location relative to your installation directory: source\Win32\soap\wsdlimporter\MessageDigest_5.pas

(Edit: 20091223:  Since Delphi 7.01, Indy has provided the unit IdHashMessageDigest which also does md5, see the comments below)

So this unit used by the WSDL, and more importantly: works with Unicode (if you pass it a string with Unicode characters, it will convert them to UTF-8 first).
The unit is not in your default search path, and has not been very well promoted (the only link at the Embarcadero site was an article by Pawel Glowacki), so few people know about it.

Now you know too :-)

Note that MD5 is normally used to hash binary data.
It is not wise to send a non ASCII string through both the AnsiString and UnicodeString versions: because of the different encoding (and therefore a different binary representation), you will get different results depending on the Delphi version used.

A sample of the usage showing the above AnsiString/UnicodeString issue is not present for ASCII strings, nor for ANSI strings: this is because both get encoded using UTF-8 before hashing.
Delphi 2007 did not do the UTF-8 encoding, so you will see different results here.
You will also see that Writeln uses the Console for encoding, and those are different than the code editor.

Edit: 20091216 – added RawByteString example to show that the conversion does not matter.

<br />program md5;<br /><br />{$APPTYPE CONSOLE}<br /><br />uses<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  SysUtils,<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  MessageDigest_5 in 'C:\Program Files\Embarcadero\RAD Studio\7.0\source\Win32\soap\wsdlimporter\MessageDigest_5.pas';<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  // Vista/Windows 7: MessageDigest_5 in 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\RAD Studio\7.0\source\Win32\soap\wsdlimporter\MessageDigest_5.pas';<br /><br />function GetMd5(const Value: AnsiString): string; overload;<br />var<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  hash: MessageDigest_5.IMD5;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  fingerprint: string;<br />begin<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  hash := MessageDigest_5.GetMD5();<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  hash.Update(Value);<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  fingerprint := hash.AsString();<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  Result := LowerCase(fingerprint);<br />end;<br /><br />function GetMd5(const Value: UnicodeString): string; overload;<br />var<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  hash: MessageDigest_5.IMD5;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  fingerprint: string;<br />begin<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  hash := MessageDigest_5.GetMD5();<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  hash.Update(Value);<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  fingerprint := hash.AsString();<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  Result := LowerCase(fingerprint);<br />end;<br /><br />var<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  SourceAnsiString: AnsiString;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  SourceUnicodeString: UnicodeString;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  SourceRawByteString: RawByteString;<br /><br />begin<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  try<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    SourceAnsiString := 'foobar';<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    SourceUnicodeString := 'foobar';<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    SourceRawByteString := 'foobar';<br /><br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    Writeln(GetMd5(SourceAnsiString));<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    Writeln(GetMd5(SourceUnicodeString));<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    Writeln(GetMd5(SourceRawByteString));<br /><br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    SourceAnsiString := 'föøbår';<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    SourceUnicodeString := 'föøbår';<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    SourceRawByteString := 'föøbår';<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    Writeln(SourceAnsiString, ' ', GetMd5(SourceAnsiString));<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    Writeln(SourceUnicodeString, ' ', GetMd5(SourceUnicodeString));<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    Writeln(SourceRawByteString, ' ', GetMd5(SourceRawByteString));<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  except<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    on E: Exception do<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>      Writeln(E.ClassName, ': ', E.Message);<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  end;<br />end.<br />

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, Encoding, Hashing, md5, Power User, Security, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8 | 28 Comments »

Phone SPAM: Random Digit Dialing

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/12/10

Just learned something new this evening: ‘Random Digit Dialing’.

A few minutes ago, I got called on an unlisted phone numberby a Dutch company offering money and a kind of lottery mechanism if I was going to take part in their surveys.
In other words: phone SPAM.

They call with a shielded phone number.
So there is no way I can distinguish them from friends that do have a legitimate reason for having an unlisted phone number.

The company that called told me that the only way to avoid these calls was to list all my info that they should not contact me at in some central database, even if the info was already unlisted in the first place.
The world up side down!

And to top it off: Now that they have contacted me, they have the phone number, so I’m bound to be called there again by them.

–jeroen

Posted in About, Personal | Leave a Comment »

Fiddler replaying requests to the ASP.NET Development Server: XP works but Vista not, or “when localhost is not 127.0.0.1 in Fiddler 2”

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/12/09

Today, I bumped into something utterly strange: requests replayed through Fiddler 2 to a locally running ASP.NET Development Server on Vista using localhost URLs did not give a connection.

I use ASP.NET from both C# and Delphi Prism. Most of my development work is on Windows XP (see notes below) but I test on many platforms.
Moving one of the projects from XP to Vista, and testing with Fiddler, I found that when using Fiddler 2:

This form of URL fails on Vista, but works on XP: http://localhost:49703
This form of URL works both on Vista, and XPhttp://127.0.0.1:49703

So on Vista – contrary to XP – localhost requests from Fiddler were in fact being sent to the external network adapter on Vista, and the 127.0.0.1 requests to the internal network adapter.
Since the ASP.NET Development Server is bound only to the internal network adapter, external requests don’t work (boy, I wish they did, it would make some of my debugging so much easier!).

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, ASP.NET, C#, Delphi, Development, Fiddler, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Prism, Software Development, Web Development | 2 Comments »

TIFF preview in GMail now works (was: GMail + TIFF = ? « Scientia potentia est « The Wiert Corner – Jeroen Pluimers’ irregular stream of Wiert stuff)

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/12/08

in GMail, TIFF preview suport has started working again!

Which means that I know can read incoming FAX messages in the preview window in stead of saving and viewing them in an external tool.

It probably means that the bug here is fixed:

GMail + TIFF = ? « Scientia potentia est « The Wiert Corner – Jeroen Pluimers’ irregular stream of Wiert stuff.

–jeroen

Posted in GMail, Google | 1 Comment »

Foto’s speciale dienst “Kerk der Friezen” online

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/12/07

Toen we afgelopen maand tussen de verbouwing door even in Rome waren, had ik op zondag 15 november een bijzonder mogelijkheid om foto’s te nemen in de Kerk der Friezen (ook Friezenker genoemd) tijdens de dienst ter ere van het opleveren van de restauratie. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About, Personal, Travel | Leave a Comment »

Le Vosgien du Net · Switch between versions of Firebird SQL Server

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/12/05

This is very handy on testing your software on multiple versions of FireBird.
Now someone that expands this to InterBase as well :-)

Le Vosgien du Net · Switch between versions of Firebird SQL Server.

–jeroen

Posted in Database Development, Development, Firebird, InterBase | 2 Comments »