Now that you’re 21, have a glass of wine and watch this great presentation by Warren Postma which he made for last years birthday:
–jeroen
Archive for the ‘Development’ Category
Happy birthday Delphi, have some wine
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/02/14
Posted in Delphi, Delphi 1, Delphi 2, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 3, Delphi 4, Delphi 5, Delphi 6, Delphi 7, Delphi 8, Delphi x64, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Delphi XE8, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
BLDN: December 2015 XE7/XE8 Update Subscription Update got released 20160211 with backported 10 Seattle fixes
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/02/13
Seems they got only released just yesterday because of the QA effort taking a long time. But it’s good news for Delphi/Rad Studio/C++-Builder Update Subscription members: some fixes are now back-ported to 2 Delphi versions. Which is a new milestone in support from Embarcadero.
Anyway: BLDN.
Note that the list of fixes is at the bottom of these pages:
Source: RAD Studio Hotfixes for XE8 and XE7 with 10 Seattle fixes
I also found out that I never updated the links for XE8 update 1 downloads (I did the original XE8 links Delphi XE8 is out with version 22.0.19027.8951; Spring4D is almost ready. « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff) so there they are:
- http://altd.embarcadero.com/download/radstudio/xe8/delphicbuilder_xe8_update1_general.exe
(If you don’t have a subscription; I think this one only contains hotfixes) - http://altd.embarcadero.com/download/radstudio/xe8/radstudio_xe8_upd1_subscription.exe
- http://altd.embarcadero.com/download/radstudio/xe8/delphicbuilder_xe8_upd1_subscription.iso
–jeroen
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Posted in Delphi, Delphi 10 Seattle, Delphi XE7, Delphi XE8, Development, Software Development | 2 Comments »
Blast from the past Windows 2003 Service Pack 1..2 era hotpatching
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/02/12
For a short while (from Windows 2003 Service Pack 1 till Windows 2003 service pack 2) some updates used Windows Hotpatching.
Some links on the how/why and how to abuse it:
- Windows Hotpatching: A Walkthrough | Johannes Passing’s Blog
- Windows Hotpatching | Johannes Passing’s Blog
- Why do Windows functions all begin with a pointless MOV EDI, EDI instruction? | The Old New Thing
- How I Built a Working Online Poker Bot, Part 7: Extracting Text from 3rd-Party Applications | Coding the Wheel
All because of this little post:
Hier ein Einblick in die Denkweise von Leuten, die Software auf CD-ROM verteilen und bei denen Release Zyklen in Monaten und nicht Minuten gemessen werd… – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+
–jeroen
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Posted in C, Development, History, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
Translation Memory Tools Tried and Found Wanting – Oli’s Blog
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/02/11
Thanks Oliver for sumarising this: Translation Memory Tools Tried and Found Wanting – Oli’s Blog
His conclusion support why I see all my clients building their own translation tooling: no 3rd party tool really supports the full process well, especially not the translation memory parts.
–jeroen
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Posted in Development, internatiolanization (i18n) and localization (l10), Software Development | Leave a Comment »
You find a lot of stuff when you are reorganizing your office #TP6 Library…
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/02/11
You find a lot of stuff when you are reorganizing your office #TP6 Library….
I must clean out my closets as well. I think I have similar stuff lying around.
–jeroen
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Posted in Delphi, Development, History, Software Development, Turbo Pascal | Leave a Comment »
Fix for Visual Studio – Resharper Alt Enter not working – Stack Overflow
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/02/10
Thanks User Josh Close – Stack Overflow. for answering the below on Stack Overflow: it got my Resharper Alt-Enter key workign again.
Re-apply Visual Studio keyboard scheme:
- (VS2013 latest ReSharper)
- ReSharper > Options > Environment > Keyboard & Menus > ReSharper Platform keyboard scheme: Visual Studio > Apply Scheme > Save.
- This will reset the shortcut keys for ReSharper.
- (older versions)
- ReSharper > Options > Environment > General > Visual Studio Integration > Apply
–jeroen
via: visual studio – Resharper Alt Enter not working – Stack Overflow.
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Posted in .NET, C#, Development, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Power User, Software Development, Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio and tools | Leave a Comment »
Orthogonality and the DRY Principle
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/02/09
Interview with by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master.
Many interesting quotes including:
Most people take DRY to mean you shouldn’t duplicate code. That’s not its intention. The idea behind DRY is far grander than that.
–jeroen
via Orthogonality and the DRY Principle.
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Posted in Agile, Development, DRY, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
When your license check is faulty and causes customers to loose work it’s a cardinal sin
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/02/04
I wrote about this before, named it a cardinal sin too, but I seem to have to repeat this:
When your product thinks the license is validate and quits without allowing the customer to save its work, then you’ve committed a cardinal sin.
Yes, I can talk about cardinal sins: I’ve been named after the artist Hieronymus Bosch (:
For me it is OK if a product checks for binaries that do not to the product (and not signed by the vendor) in the product directories and fails to start, or to present a nag screen that takes a while to disappear, or even to limit functionality.
But:
- The product should always tell why the license check failed.
- The product never can force the customer to loose work.
- The documentation should show failure situations (not just the OK counterparts).
Given some recent posts and the fact that over the course of 10 different versions I lost days of work and at conferences I usually get multiple questions from people having suffered from this, I really had to bring this up again.
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Posted in Delphi, Development, Licensing, Software Development | 7 Comments »
Some links and references to IBM CUA: Common User Access which defines a lot of the UIs and UX we still use.
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/02/04
Back in the late 80s and early 90s of last century, engineers Richard E. Berry, Cliff J. Reeves set a standard that still influences the user interfaces and user experience of today: the IBM Common User Access.
I mentioned CUA a few times before, but since an old client of mine managed to throw away their paper originals in a “we don’t need that old stuff any more as we are now all digital” frenzy, I wanted to locate some PDFs. And I promised to write more about CUA.
If anyone has printed versions of the non-PDF documents below, please donate them to aek at bitsavers.org or scanning at archive.org as they are really hard to get.
A few search queries I used:
- IBM Common User Access bitsavers (as bitsavers.org keeps a lot of PDF materials)
- IBM CUA filetype:pdf
- IBM “Common User Access” filetype:pdf
The PDFs I think are most interesting:
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Posted in BitSavers.org, Development, Hardware, History, IBM SAA CUA, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, KVM keyboard/video/mouse, Power User, Software Development, UI Design, Usability, User Experience (ux) | 3 Comments »
Windows Vista/7/8/… hangs for Windows Common dialogs when your COM initialisation is wrong
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/02/03
A while ago I bumped into this: As of Windows 7 (and probably Vista), the standard Windows Common Item (Open and Save) Dialogs expect the main thread to be initialised with STA because it is easier to support apartment threading in single-threaded apartments because COM provides synchronization on a per-call basis and the Windows GUI APIs are not guaranteed to be thread safe.
Windows XP and Server 2003 didn’t enforce this for the classic Windows Open and Save Dialogs, so it only appeared when the software below got run on Windows 7 in a way too late time frame (but the market share of XP is still high).
The reason is that when using Delphi, the TOpenDialog and TSaveDialog will use the classic Open and Save Dialogs on Windows < Vista and fall-forward to the new Common Item Dialogs handled by TFileOpenDialog and TFileSaveDialog (both will not fall backward).
When you have your COM initialisation done wrong, your application appears to hang. Amidst the plethora of threads started by the COM subsystem, these two dead-lock:
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Posted in Delphi, Delphi 10 Seattle, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Delphi XE8, Development, Software Development | 2 Comments »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 