Archive for the ‘Development’ Category
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/10/15
The Delphi MESSAGE directive is a very powerful one, you can generate compiler hints, warnings and errors with it, even fatal ones that abort compilation.
The compiler will return error codes H1054 (hint), W1054 (warning), E1054 (error) or F1054 (fatal error), which in the documentation are known under the catch-all x1054.
You need to take a bit of care with message directives, especially with the quotes. For instance
{$Message Error 'Not implemented'}
gives you the error below, but continues compiling:
[DCC Error] E1054 Not implemented
However, if you forget the single quotes
{$Message Error Not implemented}
it gives you error E1030 (not x1054), which is a bit confusing as it is a catch-all for invalid directives:
[DCC Error] E1030 Invalid compiler directive: 'message'
Here is a full example (now moved to bitbucket) of all the message directives and compiler reactions you can get: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/10/14
Delphi and 3rd party tools keep some of the settings in your %AppData% directory. Much more convenient than the registry as they are easier to read and modify when needed (also easier to damage <g>). We’ll start with an overview where various versions of Delphi store their configuration files, then show how the Favourites on the Welcome Page are stored, then end with an overview of BDS, Company Names and Product Names. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 8, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Development, History, Software Development | 4 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/10/09
When using any version control system, understanding which idiom you should follow to do proper branching, merging, tagging, etc is key to your process, and the most difficult thing to get a feel for.
For me, the most confusing part is that branches, tags, and the trunk are directories (both on your development system and the SVN server), and it is hard to see which local directory is switched to what remote one.
As soon as I understood that this was the most confusing aspect for me, I could focus on it and handle it much better.
For SVN (and TortoiseSVN), these links proved to be very valuable for me: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Development, Software Development, Source Code Management, Subversion/SVN | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/10/08
I never realized you could overwrite the CD pseudo environment variable. If you do, the automatic value of the pseudo variable will not be udpated any more:
You have at some point set the CD variable explicitly. If you do this it will no longer automatically reflect the current working directory. To undo this, set it to empty:
set CD=
Thanks Jonathan and … for explaining this in both your answers.
Thanks to another answer by Endoro I now also know of the %=C:% pseudo variable (you have one per drive letter) that indicate the current directory per drive letter.
–jeroen
via: batch file – When is the CD environment variable updated? – Stack Overflow.
Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/10/07
Calling Randomize too often can make your Random numbers even less random.
Sometimes having the Randomize call in a unit initialization section is not practical.
Hence this little method that I think I first wrote back in the Turbo Pascal days:
procedure RandomizeIfNeeded();
begin
if RandSeed = 0 then
Randomize();
end;
–jeroen
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 for PHP, Delphi x64, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Development, Pascal, Software Development, Turbo Pascal | 7 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/10/06
I just found this [Wayback] great answer (which by now regrettably is deleted; the previous Wayback link still has it) by [Wayback] Јοеу a.k.a. Johannes Rössel on [Wayback] What encoding/code page is cmd.exe using.
The whole answer is worth reading, so I won’t quote only some bits.
Edit 20210609: the answer now has been replaced by an even more detailed answer [Wayback] by [Wayback] andrewdotn. Also recommended reading. The summary of the new answer is this:
The moral of the story?
type can print UTF-16LE files with a BOM regardless of your current codepage- Win32 programs can be programmed to output Unicode to the console, using
WriteConsoleW.
- Other programs which set the codepage and adjust their output encoding accordingly can print Unicode on the console regardless of what the codepage was when the program started
- For everything else you will have to mess around with
chcp, and will probably still get weird output.
–jeroen
via: windows – What encoding/code page is cmd.exe using – Stack Overflow.
Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Encoding, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/10/02
It is always cool to see some mashups: apart from great examples, they also make for some good research material.
–jeroen
Posted in Development, Google, GoogleMaps, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/10/01
I’ve been experimenting with the Delphi hinting directives lately to make it easier to migrate some libraries to newer versions of Delphi and newer platforms.
Hinting directives (deprecated, experimental, library and platform) were – like the $MESSAGE directive – added to Delphi 6.
Up to Delphi 5 you didn’t have any means to declare code obsolete. You had to find clever ways around it.
Warnings for hinting directives
When referring to identifiers marked with a hinting directive, you can get various warning messages that depend on the kind of identifier: unit, or other symbol. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Apple Pascal, Borland Pascal, DEC Pascal, Delphi, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 6, Delphi 7, Delphi 8, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Development, Encoding, FreePascal, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Java, Lazarus, MQ Message Queueing/Queuing, QC, Reflection, Software Development, Sybase, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8 | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/09/30
I recently bumped into the NTCore website by Daniel Pisti.
At a client without my own VMs, I wanted to create a DebugBreak like function in Delphi, which I remembered from my Turbo Pascal days to be something like Inline($CC). So searching for both Delphi and INT 3, I found an EXE injection page at NTCore.
In Delphi, you can do this with a procedure like this, which cannot be inlined because it has an asm block:
procedure DebugBreak();
asm
int 3
end;
(Reminder to self: sort out what to do here to break on an iOS device; Xcode has an alternative)
The site has information about system internals and software security posted as articles until 2009, when he switched to blog posts. Besides that, he has written a bunch of interesting articles at CodeProject. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Delphi, Development, Pascal, Power User, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, Windows, xCode/Mac/iPad/iPhone/iOS/cocoa | 3 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/09/25
Unpatched bash allows for remote code execution.
Patch as soon as you can and be aware that the current patches might not be complete.
Many vendors (including Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu) already have patches available: CERT/NIST reveal level 10 bash alert today, 24 September 2014.
This is a long article which explains the why/how/… and has an easy check to see if you are vulnerable: What is the CVE-2014-6271 bash vulnerability and, how do I fix it.
It looks like the current patches aren’t complete yet, but do plug big parts of the hole.
Watch bash CVEs in Ubuntu and CVE-2014-7169 in Ubuntu (and maybe for other nx varieties as well).
Update:
Quote from the article:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 