Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/09
From the century start era of The Pragmatic Bookshelf | The Pragmatic Programmer, a – still valid – list of Pragmatic Software Development Tips.
From Care About Your Craft, via DRY, Some Things Are Better Done than Described, Keep Knowledge in Plain Text, Work With a User to Think Like a User, Find the Box, and many others till Sign Your Work.
–jeroen
via: The Pragmatic Bookshelf | List of Tips.
Posted in .NET, C++, Cloud Development, COBOL, CommandLine, Delphi, Development, Fortran, iSeries, Java, Pascal, RegEx, Scripting, Software Development, Web Development, xCode/Mac/iPad/iPhone/iOS/cocoa | 3 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/08
Lucida Console Sample (thanks Wikimedia!)
I’m in search to see if there is a better programmers font than the monospaced Lucida Console mainly to be used in Visual Studio, Delphi, the Windows console, Xcode and Eclipse. What I love about Lucida Console design is the relatively large x-height combined with a small leading (often called “line height”). This combines very readable text, and a lot of code lines in view. Lucida has two small drawbacks, see the second image at the right:
But, since the font hasn’t been updated for a very long time, lots of Unicode code points that are now in current fonts, are missing from Lucida Console (unless you buy the [Wayback] most recent version that has 666 characters from Fonts.com) Well, there are dozens of monospaced fonts around, so I wonder: which ones do you like? In the mean while, I’m going to do some experimenting with fonts mentioned in these lists:
A few fonts I’m considering (I only want scalable fonts, so raster .fon files are out):
I have tried Adobe Source Code Pro about half a year ago. That didn’t cut it: problem with italics in Delphi, and not enough lines per screen. [Wayback] New Open Source monospaced font from Adobe: Source Code Pro.
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, Adobe Source Code Pro, Apple, Delphi, Delphi 2007, Delphi XE3, Development, Encoding, Font, Lucida Console, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Programmers Font, Software Development, Typography, Unicode, Visual Studio 11, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio and tools, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows XP, xCode/Mac/iPad/iPhone/iOS/cocoa | 43 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/02
for my link archive:
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Development, Software Development | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/01
This is more elaborate English version of a short Dutch message I recently sent to explain the differences between VCL and FMX:
Do not regard FMX as a replacement for VCL: they are different kinds of frameworks.
VCL is a wrapper around Windows Controls. In itself, it has not much functionality: it exposes the underlying Windows functionality. The exception are data aware controls that provide basic functionality for writing data aware applications. There is a huge 3rd party market for extending VCL support, for instance providing extra Windows functionality, enriching data aware behaviour (look at all those fancy data aware grids), and many more.
FMX is the FireMonkey X-platform framework. Major functionalities are vector based 2D, 3D drawing and controls, and support for styles and composition.
When introducing FMX in Delphi XE2, Embarcadero also introduced a new way of data binding that is shared with FMX and VCL. FMX extends this a bit to some basic data aware controls.
Gone are most of the platform specific features like drag & drop, full blown Windows Shell ListViews, etc. There are some controls that manifests themselves differently on each supported platform (like Pickers), but most of that is currently left to the 3rd party FMX component market.
So if you want FMX to replace VCL, then be prepared for quite some shopping in the 3rd party market.
CLX tried to be a full blown cross platform VCL replacement, but that didn’t work very well.
–jeroen
Posted in Delphi, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Development, FireMonkey, OS X FMX, Software Development | Tagged: component market, data binding, fmx, software, technology, vcl, windows controls | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/04/28
Thomas Mueller is fast: experimental GExperts + code formatter for Delphi XE4 « twm’s blog.
–jeroen
Posted in Delphi, Delphi XE4, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/04/24
So I won’t forget, as the [WayBack] static in different languages varies in meaning:
[WayBack] Static on class methods makes them assignment compatible with plain old function pointers.
Thanks Moritz Beutel for initially posting this.
–jeroen
via:
related:
Like class methods, class static methods can be accessed without an object reference. Unlike ordinary class methods, class static methods have no Self parameter at all. They also cannot access any instance members. (They still have access to class fields, class properties, and class methods.) Also unlike class methods, class static methods cannot be declared virtual.
Methods are made class static by appending the word static to their declaration.
Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Development, Software Development | 5 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/04/23
You might think the below question on CodePage zero is Delphi related, but most of it is not.
It is about CP_ACP (the currently Active CodePage, and has some interesting observations:
CP_ACP is the major reason people have difficulties exchanging the data in text files between applications on different computers.
Oh and you can get the actual value of the active Active CodePage using GetACP, but CP_ACP isn’t always slower..
–jeroen
via: delphi – What is Codepage 0? – Stack Overflow.
Posted in .NET, Delphi, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/04/18
Link clearance, mostly centered around “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Ports” and “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\DOS Devices“:
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, Delphi, Development, Software Development | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/04/17
Some notes if I ever want to do something like this.
In this case I worked around it by having the Items include different text (since I had object pointers in the TStrings anyway) so I could stick to the csDropDown Style.
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–jeroen
Posted in Delphi, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Development, Software Development | 3 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/04/11
A small duh moment when I found this out myself the hard way: when repeatedly drawing anti-aliased text, it will alter the background on each draw.
So you cannot do that. Not in Delphi, not in .NET, not in Cocoa, nowhere (:
–jeroen
via: delphi – “Additive” text rendering on TCanvas? – Stack Overflow.
Posted in .NET, Delphi, Development, FireMonkey, Software Development, User Experience (ux), WinForms, WPF, XNA | 7 Comments »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
TComboBoxStyleHook. – David Heffernan Sep 9 at 13:13Business Layergives me aTStringswith theObjectsfilled (it is pre-Delphi-2009, so no generics yet). That’s why I can get out theTextsou easy (: First I need to finish about a week of .NET work though. – Jeroen Wiert Pluimers Sep 10 at 16:03TExtComboBoxand its own VCL styles feature. – Warren P Sep 10 at 20:45Objectinstance references are already in theTStrings, I wrote a small function to return a new temporaryTStringsthat has the string values with the captions I needed and keep theObjectreferences. Since it has the same item ordering, and sameObjectreferences I don’t need any mapping at all. Just need to make sure I free the newTStringsat the right moment. – Jeroen Wiert Pluimers Sep 10 at 21:24