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

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Archive for January, 2020

Of Course Psychological Safety…But How? – John Cutler – Medium

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/01/23

On my reading list: [WayBackOf Course Psychological Safety…But How? – John Cutler – Medium

Medium indicates it is an 8 minute tread, but since I’m more on the non-people side of the spectrum, digesting it will take quite some time needing multiple reeds.

Via: [WayBack] Of Course Psychological Safety…But How? – John Cutler – Medium – Marjan Venema – Google+

Marjan is a great coach on the personal and agility side of things.

–jeroen

Posted in Agile, Development, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Delphi developer switching to C# – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/01/23

Another blast from the past. I’ve been using many development environment all my live, so I have been using .NET very early on allowing me to make a good comparison: [WayBackDelphi developer switching to C# – Stack Overflow.

I have a broad toolbox because we’ve never lived in a “silver bullet” era: any problem needs a combination of tools to solve them. Having a broad toolset allows you to pick and choose more easily. Mastering the different tools however requires a lot of effort and time. You really need to love this profession to put that energy in it.

I heavily use both for software development.

Development speed of server apps (web apps, web services, windows services) is much higher in .NET.

Development speed of business apps (pure Windows UI) is much higher in Delphi.

Development of sexy apps is a pain in both environments.

A few things you should know:

  • Learning the .NET framework will take a lot of time: it is huge, but contains a lot of gizmos (some gems are really well hidden).
  • Don’t lose yourself in following all new trends at once: generics, lambda, LINQ, each are nice, but grasping them all at once is only for a few of us
  • For web apps, skip WebForms, but learn ASP.NET MVVC (yes, the Ruby guys were right after all); learn HTML 5 and JavaScript too.
  • For sexy Windows apps, learn WPF, but be prepared for a steep learning curve (designer, and framework are radically different)
  • Don’t get a too sexy UI: it costs you a disproportional amount of time while your users are waiting for functionality
  • Like the market has been bashing Delphi since version 1, the market is bashing SilverLight too
  • Skip WinForms; if you need something like WinForms, then Delphi is way more productive (even more so if you have an existing Delphi VCL codebase).
  • WPF is just as thread-friendly as the VCL or WinForms (read: neither of the 3 is thread friendly)
  • Don’t perform rewrites of your Delphi stuff in .NET (or for that matter any other 1:1 rewrite from platform A into platform B): it is a waste of your time.
  • Threading and synchronization are a pain in all development environments. The pain is not so much in the general stuff (the Concurrent Collections in the .NET 4 framework helps, as do the Delphi OmniThreadLibrary), but in getting the final details and exception cases right is the real pain.
  • Garbage collection does not mean that you won’t leak memory: it means that you won’t leak when your app terminates, but while it runs the leaks are way harder to detect (boy, I wish I had the FastMM memory monitor for .NET)

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Development, Software Development | 3 Comments »

Delphi / Visual Studio build events: xcopy exit code 9009; ensure your PATH indeed includes the Windows directories

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/01/22

If you ever get an exit code 9009 from xcopy like the one below, then try using the full path to xcopy. It should be there, it should not matter, but it does if someone changed your path.

[Exec Error] The command " xcopy ....\Shared\DLL\FastMM\FastMM_FullDebugMode.dll .\Win32\Debug\ /y&& xcopy ....\Shared\DLL\OpenSSL\libeay32.dll .\Win32\Debug\ /y&& xcopy ....\Shared\DLL\OpenSSL\ssleay32.dll .\Win32\Debug\ /y&& xcopy ....\Shared\DLL\gRPC\nghttp2.dll .\Win32\Debug\ /y&& xcopy ....\Shared\DLL\gRPC\sgcWebSockets.dll .\Win32\Debug\ /y" exited with code 9009.

Preliminary solution: replace xcopy    with C:\Windows\System32\xcopy.exe .

Final solution: look with Process Explorer and Process Monitor what the exact environment PATH is. It should include C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\System32\Wbem;

If it does not, then find out what is changing your path.

Related:

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Delphi, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Bloemencorso Bollenstreek vanwege warme winters voortaan een week eerder | NOS

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/01/22

Dit jaar is het corso als vanouds op 25 april. Volgend jaar rijden de praalwagens op 17 april. Afgesproken is wel dat het evenement nooit tijdens Pasen zal worden georganiseerd.

[WayBack] Bloemencorso Bollenstreek vanwege warme winters voortaan een week eerder | NOS

Interferentie met mijn verjaardag (29 april!) gaat dus nooit meer gebeuren (:

–jeroen

Posted in About, Adest Musica, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User | Leave a Comment »

CSS Animation How To Tutorial – Dev Tuts

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/01/22

So as the author of CSS3 Animate It I have a good background in CSS animation. Before CSS3 was released you would have to resort to using JS for animation…

Even after CSS3 got introduced, I’m still not sure I’d use animation: [WayBack] CSS Animation How To Tutorial – Dev Tuts

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in CSS, Development, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

The intrinsic factory pattern that every Delphi programmer uses

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/01/22

A blast from the past: my 2009 answer to [WayBackWhat Design Patterns do you implement in common Delphi programming? – Stack Overflow which is still very much relevant today.

TL;DR

Every Delphi programmer uses the factory pattern as it is an intrinsic part of how components at design time work.

So he were go:

Only a minority of the Delphi developers knows that every Delphi developer uses a Factory pattern (delphi.about.com has an example in “regular” Delphi), but then implemented using virtual Create constructors.

So: time to shed some light on that :-)

Virtual constructors are to classes like virtual methods are like object instances.

The whole idea of the factory pattern is that you decouple the logic that determines what kind (in this case “class”) of thing (in this case “object instance”) to create from the actual creation.

It works like this using virtual Create constructors:

TComponent has a virtual Create constructor so, which can be overridden by any descending class:

type
  TComponent = class(TPersistent, ...)
    constructor Create(AOwner: TComponent); virtual;
    ...
  end;

For instance the TDirectoryListBox.Create constructor overrides it:

type
  TDirectoryListBox = class(...)
    constructor Create(AOwner: TComponent); override;
    ...
  end;

You can store a class reference (the class analogy to an object instance reference) in a variable of type ‘class type’. For component classes, there is a predefined type TComponentClass in the Classes unit:

type
  TComponentClass = class of TComponent;

When you have a variable (or parameter) of type TComponentClass, you can do polymorphic construction, which is very very similar to the factory pattern:

var
  ClassToCreate: TComponentClass;

...

procedure SomeMethodInSomeUnit;
begin
  ClassToCreate := TButton;
end;

...

procedure AnotherMethodInAnotherUnit;
var
  CreatedComponent: TComponent;
begin
  CreatedComponent := ClassToCreate.Create(Application);
  ...
end;

The Delphi RTL uses this for instance here:

Result := TComponentClass(FindClass(ReadStr)).Create(nil);

and here:

// create another instance of this kind of grid
SubGrid := TCustomDBGrid(TComponentClass(Self.ClassType).Create(Self));

The first use in the Delphi RTL is how the whole creation process works of forms, datamodules, frames and components that are being read from a DFM file.

The form (datamodule/frame/…) classes actually have a (published) list of components that are on the form (datamodule/frame/…). That list includes for each component the instance name and the class reference. When reading the DFM files, the Delphi RTL then:

  1. finds about the components instance name,
  2. uses that name to find the underlying class reference,
  3. then uses the class reference to dynamically create the correct object

A regular Delphi developer usually never sees that happen, but without it, the whole Delphi RAD experience would not exist.

Allen Bauer (the Chief Scientist at Embarcadero), wrote a short blogarticle about this topic as well. There is also a SO question about where virtual constructors are being used.

Let me know if that was enough light on the virtual Create constructor topic :-)

This resulted in this interesting comment by Kenneth Cochran:

Factory pattern implementations in other languages use ordinary static functions (or class functions for pascalites). As such they are capable of returning null(nil). A Delphi constructor, like the nameless constructors in other languages, will always return an object reference unless you raise an exception. You are free, of course, to use a class function just as easily if the need arises.

–jeroen

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

Today’s Organizations Waste Talent. Here’s How To Change That. | Corporate Rebels

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/01/21

[WayBack] Today’s Organizations Waste Talent. Here’s How To Change That. | Corporate Rebels

Our research into more than 100 workplace pioneers reveals an important shift –“from job descriptions to talents and mastery”. It’s a clear differentiator between traditional and pioneering organizations.

Traditional organizations focus on fixed job descriptions, and linear careers that move from one description to the next. Progressive organizations focus on “talents & mastery”– and craft jobs and development opportunities around the specific skills employees would love to exploit.

The article goes on how to get the best from your talent and talents in other people.

via [WayBack] Today’s Organizations Waste Talent. Here’s How To Change That. | Corporate Rebels – Marjan Venema – Google+

–jeroen

Posted in Agile, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Delphi, compiler intrinsics and generic type matching

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/01/21

For my link archive in case I ever need to do Delphi generic type matching on intrinsic types. This will be tricky as you can have typed types like [WayBacktype TDate = type TDateTime since the early Delphi ages.

[WayBack] Hi, by using compiler intrinsics, is it possible to check if a generic type parameter is an unsigned integer? – Malcon X Portela – Google+

It will probably come down to fast intrinsic type mapping and slower typed type mapping.

The above WayBack link contains the most important bits of the Google+ post:

Hi, by using compiler intrinsics, is it possible to check if a generic type parameter is an unsigned integer? I have the following code:

function TChecker<T>.CheckIsUnsigned: Boolean;
begin
  if GetTypeKind(T) = tkInteger then
  begin
  if SizeOf(T) = 4 then
  begin
    // TODO: Check if it is an unsigned 32-bit integer
    Result := True;
  end else if SizeOf(T) = 2 then
  begin
    // TODO: Check if it is an unsigned 16-bit integer
    Result := True;
  end else
  begin
    // TODO: Check if it is an unsigned 8-bit integer
    Result := True;
  end;
  end else
  begin
    Result := False;
  end;
end;

The code should return True only if the ‘T’ generic type parameter is an unsigned integer. I remember that +Stefan Glienke posted here some code that can do this trick, however, I am not able to find that now.

Thanks!


Hi +Jeroen Wiert Pluimers, my answer can be a bit disappointing, sorry :( Some time after writing this question here, I just realized which for the things I was originally trying to do, being signed or unsigned would not change anything on the final result hehehehe :D But from this amazing project https://github.com/d-mozulyov/Rapid.Generics (entire credits goes to Dmitry Mozulyov for the magic), it is possible to write the check to the generic type parameter in order to identify if it is a 32-bit/64-bit signed or unsigned number.

LTypeData := PTypeInfo(TypeInfo(T)).TypeData;

case GetTypeKind(T) of
  tkInteger:
  begin
    {case LTypeData.OrdType of
      otSLong: Writeln('32-bit signed');
      otULong: Writeln('32-bit unsigned');
    end;}
    // the above code does the same thing
    if LTypeData.MaxValue > LTypeData.MinValue then
    begin
      Writeln('32-bit signed');
    end else
    begin
      Writeln('32-bit unsigned');
    end;
  end;
  tkInt64:
  begin
    if LTypeData.MaxInt64Value > LTypeData.MinInt64Value then
    begin
      Writeln('64-bit signed');
    end else
    begin
      Writeln('64-bit unsigned');
    end;
  end;
end;

The [WayBack] Rapid.Generics project is indeed cool, but unmaintained and has no unit tests. The main code is in some [Wayback] 30k lines Rapid.Generics.pas unit with some cool ideas and implementations. Hopefully people will find time to integrate some of the ideas there into basically the only well maintained Delphi generics library Spring4D.

A big limitation might be that the code is Delphi XE8 and up only, whereas Spring4D supports older Delphi versions.

–jeroen

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Some things I learned from “Git tips and tricks | GitLab”

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/01/21

Via [WayBackGit tips and tricks | GitLab “Handy Git commands for everyday use” I learned these:

 

–jeroen

Via: [WayBack] GitLab on Twitter: Ready to get #backtowork? Brush up on a few tips and tricks we use at GitLab everyday: https://t.co/W8zFjxnSN6

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

How to change the control of a Somfy RTS roller blind from 2 to 1 remote – Projectionscreen.net

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/01/20

This procedure works for Somfy RTS motors to:

  • removing an additional channel
  • removing an additional remote

The trick is to have one remote/channel that you want to keep working as you need that one to initiate the deletion process:

  1. On the channel/remote you want to delete
    • Test with the up/down button that it is indeed the one you want to delete
  2. On the channel/remote you want to keep
    1. Test with up/down button
      • The Somfy RTS motor show now work
    2. Press the  small button with a pen
      • The Somfy RTS motor now should “wiggle”
  3. On the channel/remote you want to delete
    1. Press the  small button with a pen
      • The Somfy RTS motor now should “wiggle” again
    2. Test with up/down button
      • The somfy RTS motor should now do nothing
  4. On the channel/remote you want to keep
    1. Test with up/down button
      • The Somfy RTS motor show still work

Via: [WayBack] How to change the control of a Somfy RTS roller blind from 2 to 1 remote – Projectionscreen.net

Videos below the fold:

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Hardware, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »