The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Archive for November 4th, 2021

Some links on Delphi compiler potential speed improvements…

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/11/04

A long time ago, there was an interesting blog post referenced from [WayBack] See how you can use Delphi’s upcoming new language feature to improve performance of your code. – Erik van Bilsen – Google+ referred to [WayBack] Inline Variables can increase performance – grijjy blog which made me comment [WayBack] “given the potential performance improvements the compiler already could do, and how long they could have been done, I would not bet on these new improvements becoming reality anytime soon.” that I later backed up with these links:

One of the observations there is that since Delphi 2005, no major compiler speed improvements have been done, and that even between Delphi 5 and 2005 mot much has been done either.

From my point of view, the – not so big – Delphi compiler team is very busy keeping balls up in the air supporting the many compiler targets and architecture changes that have been introduced over the past decade or so, that they do not have resources to improve code generation other than rely on the LLVM tool chain (which is not used for Windows x86 and x64 development that covers like 90+% of the Delphi users).

In my book, when you need an “inline var”, you usually want to refactor that bit of code into a separate method anyway.

Refactoring out parts of code that have implicit try/finally blocks for managed variables or records is a strategy that can improve execution speed in many Delphi applications anyway, especially if that piece of code is outside of the happy flow: it moves unneeded overhead out of that flow.

This is actually a strategy used for instance in the Spring4D library: Stefan Glienke has a very good insight in how the compiler works and did magic to some performance critical code paths there.

–jeroen

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

Windows 10: remove applications from the uninstall list

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/11/04

After doing Windows upgrades to Windows 10, every now and then I bump into applications that do not fully uninstall themselves and get stuck on the uninstall list (that you get when running appwiz.cpl or browse to the Control Pannel installed programs list).

[WayBack] How to Manually Remove Programs from the Add/Remove Programs List mentions to inspect registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall, but that didn’t include some of the applications.

Then I found [WayBack] Remove entry from Windows 10 Apps & Features – Super User, where the answers mentions two other keys (thanks users [WayBack] Kreiggott and [WayBack] NutCracker):

  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

Neat!

So I made the below PowerShell script to dump installed programs.

It grabs the list of registry keys containing installed software and their registry values, then empirically filters out most values that are also now shown in AppWiz.cpl.

Like database work, the values can have properties having a value or being null. So it’s SQL like expression galore to do the filtering.

This post is slightly related to Still unsolved since 2015 NetBeans: Bug 251538 – Your Installer is Creating Invalid Data for the NoModify DWORD Key which crashes enumeration of the Uninstall Key in at least PowerShell, where I already did (without documenting) some Uninstall spelunking.

## The collection of registry keys gives Name and Property of each registry key; where Property is compound containing all registry values of that key.
## Get-ItemProperty will get you all the values on which you can filter, including a few special PS* values that allow you to browse back to the registry key.

# x86 installs on x64 hardware: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12199372/get-itemproperty-not-returning-all-properties/12200100#12200100
$nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryKeys = (@
(Get-Item HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*)) + 
(Get-Item HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*) + 
(Get-Item HKLM:\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*)
    
#$nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryKeys.GetType().FullName
#$nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryKeys | Get-Member
#$nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryKeys | Out-GridView
#$nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryKeys | Get-ItemProperty | Get-Member
#$nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryKeys | Get-ItemProperty | Out-GridView
#Return
    
$nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryNameValues = $nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryKeys | 
    Get-ItemProperty |
    Where-Object {
        $_.SystemComponent -ne 1 -and $_.NoRemove -ne 1 -and
        $_.UninstallString -ne "" -and $_.UninstallString -ne $null
    }
# Filters out most things that AppWiz.cpl will leave out as well.
# Might need more fine tuning, but is good enough for now.

# PSPath shows the path to the underlying registry key of each value
$nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryNameValues |
    Select-Object SystemComponent, NoRemove, DisplayName, DisplayVersion, UninstallString, PSChildName <#, PSPath #> |
    Sort-Object DisplayName |
    Out-GridView
# Need to find a good way to output this in a really wide Format-Table text format.

–jeroen

Posted in CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10 | Leave a Comment »

I love the way it shows “Duden Offline”

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/11/04

This does not happen often, and I found the way that [WayBack] Duden Offline is indicated hilarious!

It’s just a “basic” HTML page showing the meaning of “Wartung” (German word for Maintenance).

Duden is het German equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Not all of the huge site was gone. Part of the “Rechtschreibung” was still there, including the Wikipedia entry (:

I wonder what that one shows during maintenance (:

Links:

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in CSS, Development, Fun, HTML, HTML5, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

 
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