Posted by jpluimers on 2013/01/29
If Gloegg@Bonn has posted a few nice Delphi entries over the last couple of years, so he should be added to DelphiFeeds.
His last one was a very funny post on the Delphi implementation of Sleep sort.
It uses Generics, so you need at least Delphi 2009 or better.
–jeroen
via:
Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Development, Software Development | 4 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/01/26
Back in the days I started programming, Micro Cornucopia was a wonderful magazine, so I’m glad that BitSavers scanned a few more issues and put them online today, a week after some great PDF scans: Turbo Assembler/Debugger (1993/1994), Borland C++/Object Windows Library (1993):
They covered a lot of languages (x86 and 68k assembly, C, C++, Turbo Pascal and many more), and very interesting hardware designs.
–jeroen
via: Index of /pdf/microCornucopia.
Posted in Assembly Language, BitSavers.org, C, C++, Delphi, Development, History, Pascal, Software Development, Turbo Assembler, Turbo Pascal, x86 | Tagged: computer, software, technology, wonderful magazine | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/01/20
On my interest list: game written in Delphi and now being ported to FreePascal under Lazarus for multi-platform reasons: Agenda for 2013 | www.SaschaWillems.de.
–jeroen
Posted in Delphi, Development, FreePascal, Lazarus, Pascal, Software Development | 9 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/01/17
The PDF Archive at bitsavers.org has recently put online these raster image PDF scans from Turbo Assembler/Debugger (1993/1994) and Borland C++/Object Windows Library (1993)
Remnants of the past, usefull for RAD Studio, Delphi and C++ Builder developers wanting to know a bit of history (: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Assembly Language, BitSavers.org, Borland C++, C, C++, Delphi, Development, History, Pascal, Software Development, Turbo Assembler, Turbo Pascal, x86 | Tagged: assembler version, borland C++, computer, object windows library, programmers guide, software, technology, turbo assembler | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/01/08
I’ve requested the feed of Delphi Code Monkey by Warren Postma to be added to DelphiFeeds.
In the mean time, read this post, it is awesome: Delphi Code Monkey: Why Delphi developers should learn Objective-C and XCode.
–jeroen
Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | Tagged: code monkey, delphi code, delphi developers, software, technology | 4 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/01/08
When developing in multiple languages, it sometimes is funny to see how they differ in compiler oddities.
Below are a few on const examples.
Basically, in C# you cannot go from a char const to a string const, and chars are a special kind of int.
In Delphi you cannot go from a string to a char. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in .NET, ASCII, C#, C# 1.0, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, Delphi, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Development, Encoding, Software Development, Unicode | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/07
While developing x64 applications, most Windows development tools are actually running in x86 mode, and use an intermediate x64 layer to debug the x64 process even for local debugging.
For Visual Studio 2008 and up, this is msvsmon.exe (for Delphi XE2 and up it is PAServer.exe for remote debugging or [WayBack] dbkw64_16_0.exe for local debugging, other tools use a similar mechanism).
The fun thing with Visual Studio is that when msvsmon.exe fails to load locally, you get a misleading error message:
[Microsoft Visual Studio]
Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging.
The Microsoft Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor has been closed on the remote machine.
[OK]
I found two workarounds myself :
I learned the why from Steve Steiner: he posted the StackOverflow answer explaining msvsmon.exe is also used for local x64 debugging.
Delphi XE2 and up sometimes have a similar cryptic message (I forgot to jolt it down, next time I come across it, I will edit this blog post) and usually killing PAServer.exe or dbkw63*.exe or restarting the IDE solves it.
–jeroen
via:
Posted in .NET, Debugging, Delphi, Delphi x64, Development, QC, Remote Debugging, Software Development, Visual Studio 11, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio and tools | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/06
Thanks Nick Craver for answering this on StackOverflow.
Array initializers can be specified in field declarations (§17.4), local variable declarations (§15.5.1), and
array creation expressions (§14.5.10.2).
The array initializer can end in a comma, which makes some things way easier (boy, I wish I had this in other programming languages).
From Nick’s answer:
It has no special meaning, just the way the compiler works, it’s mainly for this reason:
[FlagsAttribute]
public enum DependencyPropertyOptions : byte
{
Default = 1,
ReadOnly = 2,
Optional = 4,
DelegateProperty = 32,
Metadata = 8,
NonSerialized = 16,
//EnumPropertyIWantToCommentOutEasily = 32
}
[/language]By comment request: This info comes straight out of the ECMA C# Specification (Page 363/Section 19.7)“Like Standard C++, C# allows a trailing comma at the end of an array-initializer. This syntax provides flexibility in adding or deleting members from such a list, and simplifies machine generation of such lists.”
–jeroen
via c# – .NET Enumeration allows comma in the last field – Stack Overflow.
Posted in .NET, C#, C# 1.0, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, C++, Delphi, Development, Java, JavaScript/ECMAScript, PHP, Software Development, VB.NET | 5 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/11/20
A while ago I had a “duh” moment while calling a method that had many overloads, and one of the overloads was using int, not the char I’d expect.
The result was that a default value for that char was used, and my parameter was interpreted as a (very small) buffer size. I only found out something went wrong when writing unit tests around my code.
The culprit is this C# char feature (other implicit type conversions nicely summarized by Muhammad Javed):
A char can be implicitly converted to ushort, int, uint, long, ulong, float, double, or decimal. However, there are no implicit conversions from other types to the char type.
Switching between various development environments, I totally forgot this is the case in languages based on C and Java ancestry. But not in VB and Delphi ancestry (C/C++ do numeric promotions of char to int and Java widens 2-byte char to 4-byte int; Delphi and VB.net don’t).
I’m not the only one who was confused, so Eric Lippert wrote a nice blog post on it in 2009: Why does char convert implicitly to ushort but not vice versa? – Fabulous Adventures In Coding – Site Home – MSDN Blogs.
Basically, it is the C ancestry: a char is an integral type always known to contain an integer value representing a Unicode character. The opposite is not true: an integer type is not always representing a Unicode character.
Lesson learned: if you have a large number of overloads (either writing them or using them) watch for mixing char and int parameters.
Note that overload resolution can be diffucult enough (C# 3 had breaking changes and C# 4 had breaking changes too, and those are only for C#), so don’t make it more difficult than it should be (:
Below a few examples in C# and VB and their IL disassemblies to illustrate their differnces based on asterisk (*) and space ( ) that also show that not all implicits are created equal: Decimal is done at run-time, the rest at compile time.
Note that the order of the methods is alphabetic, but the calls are in order of the type and size of the numeric types (integral types, then floating point types, then decimal).
A few interesting observations:
Here is the example code: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in .NET, Agile, Algorithms, C#, C# 1.0, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, C++, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Floating point handling, Java, Software Development, Unicode, Unit Testing, VB.NET | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/10/08
Nice!:
New utility: PDX Viewer Plus 1.00 beta. A simple Paradox Database Viewer that does not require drivers or an install.
–jeroen
via: Twitter / alexnolannet: New utility: PDX Viewer Plus ….
Posted in Database Development, Delphi, Development, Paradox, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 