The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Archive for the ‘Delphi’ Category

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spoken @ Delphi Tage 2009 – download is on-line: Delphi power user: speed up your Delphi work

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/06/09

Last saturday, I spoke with my colleague Edwin van der Kraan at the German Delphi Tage 2009: one of the (or maybe just “the”) largest Delphi user groups events in Europe.

The session was titled “Delphi power user: speed up your Delphi work”.

Since we both speak German, the session was in German, and the slides in the download are mostly German too.

Rougly half of the session was done by demo’s and a few slides.
The rest was discussing with the public in what way they sped up their Delphi work, or what portions of their Delphi work they would like to speed up.

The room was packed with people form start to finish, and we had a lot of fun. Though the public learned a lot, even we had a few “aha” moments ourselves.

Some topics we covered were these:

Jeroen Pluimers [wahrscheinlich englischsprachig]
A lot of people use components to make their work easier. There are also tools and IDE enhancements that you can use to speed up your Delphi work. This session shows you how. We will cover new things introduced since Delphi 7 and two tools that make you really productive: Gexperts and ModelMaker CodeExplorer. The goal of this session is not to show you the vast possibilities, but to concentrate on things that you profit from most.
Some of these:
how do I write code faster
how do I write less code
which refactorings are really smart
how can I best change existing code
which changes always succeed, which ones fail and how can I adjust to these failures
how can I change the Tab Order of controls fast and accurately
what kind of breakpoint tricks are handy
how do I replace components
smart things with the Tool Palette
smart placement of your Windows
how do I find things in my project groups and on disk
how do I find my way in code that others wrote
This is not the final list, as this session has plenty of time for questions from the public. In addition, there will be room to discuss other tools. So: if there are things you do often and cost a lot of time: this is your chance to speak up!
  • The most usefull refactorings introduced since Delphi 7
  • Fun with the tool palette in non designer windows
  • Everything in Delphi is text based, including components copied to the clipboard
  • GExperts search, replace, replace components, ASCII chart and other smart stuff
  • Model Maker Code Explorer refactorings, class copying, interface implementation and a few other features
  • Beyond Compare magics

Some people (including me) took pictures during this event, you can find the combined list here.

We had a great time, not only because of the location (the ship Cap San Diego), but also because of the perfect organization by Daniel Wolf and Sabine Rothe.
Thanks to them for this wonderful event!

Posted in Component Development, Database Development, Delphi, Development, Package Development, Software Development | 2 Comments »

update to TFS 2008 Folder Comparison Filter for both C# and Delphi projects « The Wiert Corner – Jeroen Pluimers’ irregular stream of Wiert stuff

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/06/09

Last month I wrote about the TFS 2008 Folder Comparison Filter for both C# and Delphi projects; here is an update:

If you enable the generation of MAP files during compilation, you might not want to include them in your search filter.

Also, the .suo, .user and .webinfo extensions were missing (for an explanation of Visual Studio file extensions, see here and here), so then the search filter becomes this:

!*.pdb;!*.obj;!*.dll;!*.exe;!*.res;!*.resources;!*.cache;!*.ilk;!*.ncb;!obj\;!objd\;!bin\;!lib\;!*.local;!*.identcache;!*.dcu;!__history;!*.dsk;!*.~*;!*.stat;!*.drc;!*.map;!*.csproj.user;!*.vbproj.user;!*.csproj.webinfo;!*.vbproj.webinfo;!*.suo

Have fun with it!

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Development, Prism, Software Development, Source Code Management, TFS (Team Foundation System), Visual Studio and tools | Leave a Comment »

TFS 2008 Folder Comparison Filter for both C# and Delphi projects

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/05/25

When using TFS (Team Foundation System) 2008 as a Version Control / Source Code Management system not only for your C#, but also for Delphi projects, this is a good filter string when using the ‘Compare Folders‘ function of TFS:

!*.pdb;!*.obj;!*.dll;!*.exe;!*.res;!*.resources;!*.cache;!*.ilk;!*.ncb;!obj\;!objd\;!bin\;!lib\;!*.local;!*.identcache;!*.dcu;!__history\;!*.dsk;!*.~*;!*.stat;!*.drc

This is the regular Folder Comparison Filter – the bold above is the addition and the link contains an explanation of the filter syntax:

!*.pdb;!*.obj;!*.dll;!*.exe;!*.res;!*.resources;!*.cache;!*.ilk;!*.ncb;!obj\;!objd\;!bin\

Hope this helps some of you in reducing the amount of clutter in the resulting comparisons :-)

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Development, Software Development, Source Code Management, TFS (Team Foundation System) | 3 Comments »

Edited: Conferences, seminars and other public appearances « The Wiert Corner

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/05/15

I have edited the Conferences, seminars and other public appearances/ page and extended the list of conferences I have attended in the past including many sessions.

Topics covered in these sessions have been C#, Delphi, Databases, Linux, Kylix, debugging, Compact Framework, and much much more.

Let me know which sessions you’d like to see online first.

The list is far from complete, but it is another step into getting the list more accurate.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, C#, C# 2.0, Component Development, Conferences, Database Development, Delphi, Designer Development, Development, Event, Firebird, InterBase, Package Development, Software Development, SQL Server, Visual Studio and tools, XML, XML/XSD | Leave a Comment »

Delphi – more for … in support for TComponent.Components using a class helper

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/05/12

With my blog posting last week on Delphi – class helper to add for … in support for TComponent.Components/ComponentCount  I ‘lied’ a bit. 

What I actually wanted to do was write code like this:

  for Component in Self.ComponentsOfType(TSQLQuery) do
    (Component as TSQLQuery).SQL[1] := FTableName;

This filters the enumeration to only enumerate components that are of type TSQLQuery or descend from type TSQLQuery.

So I wanted to write a ‘richer’ enumerator than just iterating over all components.
The scond part of the lie is that such an enumerator in fact already exists: there is already a TComponent.GetEnumerator method.
Primoz Gabrijelcic’s – web/blog – rightly noted in the comment where he pointed to a similar blog post he wrote for TControls.

Since I wrote this post last week as well, but scheduled to be published right before DelphiLive!, I just added a reference to his comment, site, blog and posting.

TComponent already has a GetEnumerator since Delphi 2006.
But my TComponentEnumerator was meant as a base class to show you how to descend from it.
And that’s what this blog post is about.
Read the rest of this entry »

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

Delphi – class helper to add for … in support for TComponent.Components / ComponentCount

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/05/07

You might have discovered that I’m a fan of Delphi class helpers.

This is another case where I’d like to use the for … in statement: accessing the Components of a TComponent instance.

So I wanted to end up with this:

procedure MyForm.FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
var
  Component: TComponent;
begin
  for Component in Self do
  begin
  // business logic goes here
  end;
end;

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Component Development, Delphi, Development | 12 Comments »

Delphi – class helper to get SourceFileName from an EAssertionFailed

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/05/06

In one of our applications, we have a default Config.xml file that is in our source tree, but it can be overridden by a Config.xml file relative to the application’s .EXE file.
So we have a two step process looking for the Config.xml, and we’d like to have the full path to the source file where the sources were build.
It seems the only way to get that, is by looking inside the Message of an EAssertionFailed exception.

So I wrote yet another class helper to get this code to work:
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | 1 Comment »

Delphi – Michael Justin had strange floating point results when his 8087 FPU Control Word got hosed

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/05/06

Two days ago, [Wayback] Michael Justin (who just released version 1.7 of the [Wayback] Habari Active MQ Client components) posted a blog entry about a strange circumstance [Wayback] when 1.99 would not compare equally to 1.99.
He tracked it down to the [Wayback] 8087 (more formally: Intel [Wayback] FPU) Control Word being hosed on his system.

I could not reproduce his particular case, but since I have seen similar issues in the past, I wrote the DUnit test case below which shows you what can happen by manually setting the 8087 Control Word.

The difference between the 8087 Control Word values $1372 (default) and $1272 (failure) is the internal mantissa precision (see the [Wayback] “Art of Assembly Language” and the [Wayback] Intel FPU Control Word documentation on this).
Edit: Found a [Wayback] much more complete description of the bits in the FPU Control word.

It changes from 64 bits to 53 bits, which is enough to make 1.99 not equal to 1.99.

I have seen behaviour like this in the past with some networking stacks in the Turbo Pascal 7 era, with some C++ DLL’s in the Delphi 1-3 era, and some printer drivers in the Delphi 5-7 era.
Let me know in the comments (or using the contact form) where you have bumped into this.

The code below makes use of the Jcl8087 unit which is part of the JCL ([Wayback] JEDI Code Library) at [Wayback] SourceForge.
Add the unit to any DUnit test project you created and observe the results.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 8087, Algorithms, Delphi, Development, Floating point handling, Software Development | 8 Comments »

Delphi / .NET interop – Atozed announced Crosstalk

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/05/06

On 20090504, Atozed announced Crosstalk: a technology that allows native Delphi code to consume .NET assemblies in a really intuitive and transparent way.atozed-logobig-white-bg

The announcement contains a FAQ.

It is a promising technology, not only because it is dead easy to use, but also because it is backed by Atozed: a team of people that have made complex technology like Web Apps easy to use by creating IntraWeb.

Expect demos soon (maybe even at Delphi Live!).
Here is a short example:

Read the rest of this entry »

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

.NET/C# – an easier foreach for enums using generic methods

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/04/28

I like enums. Maybe because of my Turbo Pascal and Delphi background. They are descriptive. Makes code easier to read.

        public enum TrafficLightColors
        {
            Red,
            Yellow,
            Green
        }

But using them in C# foreach loops is a bit of a pain, not so much in the loop itself, but more in getting the list of values to loop over.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, C# 2.0, Delphi, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

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