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 ‘Development’ Category

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Dimensions – Chrome Web Store

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/13

[WayBack/Archive.is] Dimensions – Chrome Web Store: A tool for designers to measure screen dimensions

This extension measures the dimensions from your mouse pointer up/down and left/right until it hits a border. So if you want to measure distances between elements on a website this is perfect. It doesn’t really work with images because there the colors change a lot pixel to pixel.

# Images & HTML Elements

Measure between the following elements: images, input-fields, buttons, videos, gifs, text, icons. You can measure everything you see in the browser.

# Mockups

Your designer handed you mockups as PNGs or JPEGs? Just drop them into Chrome, activate Dimensions and start measuring.

# Keyboard Shortcut

You can start and stop dimensions with the ALT + D shortcut.

# Area Boundaries

Wanna get the radius of a circle? Is text standing in your way? Press Alt to measure the dimensions of a connected area.

–jeroen

Via:

Posted in Chrome, Chrome, Development, Google, HTML, Power User, Software Development, Web Browsers, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Unicode is hard, also for the Delphi compiler and IDE

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/13

The Delphi compiler does not see a unicode non-breaking space (0x00A0 as whitespace, and the Delphi IDE does not warn you about it: [WayBack] Delphi revelations #2 – Space characters are not just space characters.

Given that this character was introduced in 1993, I wonder how the compiler tests look like.

These also will not be recognised as whitespace:

Related, as many other tools also do not properly support various whitespace characters:

Via: [WayBack] A Delphi “Aha” experience – Kim Madsen – Google+

–jeroen

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

Find a Table on a SQL Server across all Databases – TechNet Articles – United States (English) – TechNet Wiki

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/13

Neither solution on [WayBack] Find a Table on a SQL Server across all Databases – TechNet Articles – United States (English) – TechNet Wiki is nice, but the most readable (though undocumented) works:

sp_MSforeachdb'SELECT "?" AS DB, * FROM [?].sys.tables WHERE name like ''%your_table_name%'''

Similar solutions at:

–jeroen

Posted in Database Development, Development, SQL Server | Leave a Comment »

The alphabet, in alphabetical order, in various languages – The Old New Thing

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/09

I had to lough so loud when I bumped into this [WayBack] The alphabet, in alphabetical order, in various languages – The Old New Thing.

I got there because I wanted a few examples of languages having more than 26 ASCII letters in their alphabet.

Basically all non English languages (:

–jeroen

 

Posted in Development, Fun, LifeHacker, Power User, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

Delphi icons to distinguish various Delphi versions

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/08

When installing many Delphi versions, all have similar icons. So I asked this a while ago: [WayBack] I remember someone creating version specific icons for Delphi a while ago (around XE4 era I think), but cannot find them any more. Anyone who can prov… – Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google+.

Luckily Achim Kalwa responded quickly with a set of icons he designed and put them up at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VoYeMmsr6FYgoe9EkR-psrV7aPO7Gv-v

Hopefully by now I have had time to edit them for more Delphi versions (he had them for Delphi XE7 until 10.2 Tokyo).

Delphi XE2 and lower icons seem to be at [Archive.is] Delphi versions and icons, mortenbs.com

–jeroen

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

Configure IntelliSense (SQL Server Management Studio) | Microsoft Docs

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/08

Not sure why, but all of a sudden, SSMS did not code-complete any table or column names any more.

This shows where that setting is [WayBack] Configure IntelliSense (SQL Server Management Studio) | Microsoft Docs.

The odd thing: updating to a more fresh 17.x version solved the problem all by itself.

Anyway, you can change the settings under the section “All Languages”, “Transact-SQL” or “XML”, each in the “General” sub-section:

–jeroen

Posted in Database Development, Development, SQL, SQL Server, SSMS SQL Server Management Studio | Leave a Comment »

Some free test SOAP web service endpoint sites

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/08

In the past, [WayBack] WebserviceX.NET used to be a great reference for publicly accessible SOAP web-services. Nowadays their listing contains ~2K of entries marked as DISCONTINUED in [WayBack] WebserviceX.NET API catalogue.

So below are a few sites mentioning web-services that have worked for me. No guarantee however they still work (:

Maybe I’m going to provide something myself.

–jeroen

Posted in Development, SOAP/WebServices, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

UTC is Enough for Everyone, Right?

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/07

A very long read, worth every minute: [WayBack] UTC is Enough for Everyone, Right? on Programming with dates, times, and timezones is hard. But here’s some help.

It covers a truckload of topics, like the history of time, the use of time zones, storing and transmitting time, user experience (like displaying and entering time), events, duration and much more.

Via: [WayBack] UTC is enough for everyone… right? If you have some time on your hands, you might find this rather long article quite interesting and, possibly, entertaining… – Kevin Powick – Google+

–jeroen

 

Posted in Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Reverse engineering Delphi and Turbo Pascal unit interfaces (and maybe DCP files too)

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/07

Boy, I wish there was both an Embarcadero sanctioned grammar (see Delphi code completion fail with anonymous methods – Stack Overflow) and a DCU parser.

This might work for DCP files as well, since the PKX0 signature at the start of DCP files is in [WayBack] DCU32INT/DCP.pas at master · rfrezino/DCU32INT · GitHub.

Being able to dump DCP files makes it way easier to create documenting a matrix of all DCP files and units, to their interdependencies and containments become clear (including any unit scopes).

Right now that is only documented from the unit to the package on the page of the unit (see for instance [WayBack] System.SysUtils – RAD Studio API Documentation), not the other way around. This is a pain to select which packages you need in your project when building with packages.

The list at [WayBack] Unit List – RAD Studio API Documentation (which actually is an “Alphabetical list of unit scopes, along with miscellaneous units that have no unit scope.” is only partially helpful, especially as for instance the System unit page at [WayBack] System – RAD Studio API Documentation is 90% about the System unit scope, has the System unit itself about a 3rd down and does not mention it lives in the rtl.dcp package.

The list at [WayBack] Deciding Which Runtime Packages to Use – RAD Studio is even worse than the unit list, as it misses many useful packages (like dsnap)

For my link archive:

Johan wanted to create a compiler symbol table from the binary DCU files (unlike DelphiAST which does it from the Pascal source files).

From the pre-Delphi era, I found back some info from my own archive:

In the Turbo Pascal days, you had TW1UNA and TPUUNA by William L. Peavy, which I think led to INTRFC from Duncan Murdoch (or maybe vice versa) which got updated to Turbo/Borland Pascal 7 format by Milan Dadok (see [Wayback/Archive] http://sources.ru/pascal/hacker/intrfc70.htm). Since the basic format of DCU files is very similar to that, my guess is that DCU32INT built on that.

Later I found [Wayback/Archive] The Programmer’s Corner » TPU60C.ZIP » Pascal Source Code also by William L. Peavy and Wayback/Archive] Duncan Murdoch’s Programs .

Edit 20220621:

  • moved the www8.pair.com links to murdoch-sutherland.com
  • added more Wayback and Archive links

–jeroen

Posted in Borland Pascal, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, History, Pascal, Software Development, Turbo Pascal | Leave a Comment »

Naming: avoid abbreviations and acronyms in identifiers

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/07

I see lots of code using abbreviations. Please avoid those, just like many development stacks urge you to do so.

Two important reasons:

  1. avoid confusion
  2. make it easier to read code (you read code far more often than you write code)

This is not limited to the software development field; for similar reasons, the medical field also limits the use of abbreviations and acronyms:

Read the rest of this entry »

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

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