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 2006’ Category

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BeSharp.net: PowerShell script to show the component packages (BPL) files for all installed Delphi (actually: BDS) versions.

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/11/13

A while ago, I wrote a via PowerShell script to show the component packages (BPL) files for all installed Delphi (actually: BDS) versions (now at List-Delphi-Installed-Packages.ps1) for a couple of reasons:

  • I was creating installation instructions for getting new development machines set-up
  • The new machines had to either have a minimum subset of installed Delphi versions  + components, or the maximum superset of all the existing development machines
  • Sifting through the installed Packages in the IDE, or registry by hand was cumbersome

Note that in the mean time (I queued this blog entry somewhere in 2013) the script has moved to BitBucket, I’ve written more scripts (like Dependencies.bat which is documented in Dependencies.md and Run-Dependend-rsvars-From-Path.bat), all modified all scripts to support all BDS versions I had access to, and a write nice conference paper on Build Automation for Delphi that references the scripts.

Since none of the machines were using pre BDS installations, I could limit the script to BDS 1.0 and up.

The very first (1.0) version of BDS (also known as the Gailileo IDE foundation) was in fact not a Delphi version, but C# Builder 1.0. All Delphi versions since then are based on BDS. The script is based on the BDS registry keys I researched and wrote about in Files in your Delphi settings directory; How to relocate the Favourites on your Welcome page.

Since registry access can be very much flow based, the pipeline architecture of PowerShell is a good fit.

So I wrote a PowerShell script (:

Note Thomas Mueller has written a batch file around the same set of registry keys; the thread there also has some insight in the HKLM versus HKCU keys.

I will explain my script step by step, and start with the most important one: Set-StrictMode -Version Latest. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in CommandLine, Delphi, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 8, Delphi x64, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Development, PowerShell, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Delphi: removing “unused” units from uses lists cannot be fully automated (via: SO)

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/11/11

One of the things a lot of Delphi users want is to be able to automagically remove unused units from their uses lists and projects.

The short answer is: you can’t.

The long answer starts with: you can’t fore a number of reasons.

Similar reasonings hold for many other development environments. Plain Windows EXEs and DLL dependencies. .NET projects and assembly dependencies, etc.

Initialization/Finalization dependency

The first reason is that each unit (module, assembly, or other dependency) can contain global code to be executed at unit start/load or finish/unload.

So even though you do not reference anything inside that unit, the initialization and finalization sections can be run.

Removing the dependency from your units and project, kills that functionality. And might break all sorts of things.

Load order dependency

Sometimes you have subtle load order dependencies of units. Those should be rare, and if they are there, should be enforced by the affected units themselves. But everyone knows those subtle dependencies are more often a by product not enforced by anything than coincidence.

So if you start removing references, the load order might change, and subtle bugs may occur.

In other words: test, test, test and test your codebase before and after removing unit references from uses lists.

Parsing

If you understands the dependencies of initializtion/finalization or load order, you will get interested to know what units are actually being used.

The ultimate source for this would be the Delphi compiler. Bad luck here: you cannot use it as the IDE and command-line interfaces don’t offer a hook to it to do just this.

So you need alternative parsers that can help out. The answers to How to remove unused units from all source files on Delphi XE2 describe a few and they all have the same drawback: they are not the Delphi compiler, so they are a rough approximation of what the compiler would do.

And even if the approximation would be perfect, they all suffer from the same thing the compiler suffers from: you can only have one set of conditional defines, platforms, etc at the same time.

There is lots of code for which the usage is conditional, but where the uses list does not reflect this.

Fazit

Optimizing uses lists to eliminate unused units seems a simple thing at start, but isn’t.

The best way to keep those optimized is to prune them while developing. So if you remove code, try to remember cutting down the uses lists by hand.

And then test, test, test and test your codebase.

–jeroen

via: ide – How to remove unused units from all source files on Delphi XE2? – Stack Overflow.

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 XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Development, Software Development | 8 Comments »

Windows .RES/Resource editors

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/11/07

While researching the manifest problem I will post about next week, I made a short list of free Windows Resource Editors:

All other resource editors I found were not free, and someof them not maintained for an even longer period than the free ones.

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 3, Delphi 4, Delphi 5, Delphi 6, Delphi 7, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Development, Power User, 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 | 4 Comments »

Delphi and Batch Files

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/11/06

Two interesting links today about Delphi and Batch files.

–jeroen

PS: If you want to see some serious Batch file and PowerShell related scripts, then read through the Build Automation part of my session materials I posted to ITDevCon and EKON session materials on Delphi Unit Testing + Build Automation and Continuous Integration on-line.

More details are in the batch files here:

and PowerShell scripts here:

Posted in Batch-Files, Delphi, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 7, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Development, QC, Scripting, Software Development | 7 Comments »

Delphi; Conditional defines in the .dpr: FastMM4 disappearing – via: G+ I’ve got an old problem, in which the IDE…

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/11/05

Vin Colgin posted on G+:

The kind of text that the Delphi IDE often removes in a .dpr file.

The kind of text that the Delphi IDE often removes in a .dpr file.

FastMM4 and lines in the *.dpr

I’ve got an old problem, in which the IDE will take the lines required out of the “uses” clause in the *.dpr. Something I’m sure we’re all aware of, but is there a solution to keep it from doing it?

The comments indicate the problem is less severe in more recent Delphi versions:

Daniela Osterhagen Actually it has become much better. The IDE doesn’t meddle as much with the DPR files as it used to.

One option for solving this issue is adding a new unit as the first entry that permanently stays there and moving the ifdef to that unit.

That’s what I did a long time ago and even put on-line, and even put it on-line at CodePlex as FastMM4BootstrapUnit.pas (now moved to bitbucket as FastMM4BootstrapUnit.pas). Too bad CodePlex and BitBucket are not indexed on Google, so I commented this:

I’m using a FastMM4BootstrapUnit for that at the top of my DPR; it  looks like this […]

It will eventually end up at my BeSharp.net repository any way.Let me know if you need it there soon, and I can probably get something published after the Entwickler Konferenz next week.

So various people are now using this:

  • Vin Colgin:  very nice. Thanks for the tip!
  • Warren Postma: This works fine for me in xe6 and up.
  • Bruce McGee: Nice. May I steal this? And by “steal”, I mean giving credit in the code comments.

Since I could use this unit during my EKON 2014 talk about Delphi Unit Testing, I expedited the publication:

https://bitbucket.org/jeroenp/besharp.net/src/tip/Native/Delphi/Library/FastMM/FastMM4BootstrapUnit.pas

And explained the usage in this Unit testing session session materials.

Note: this file isn’t indexed either (as BitBucket doesn’t allow it), but since the repository will be git based in the foreseeable future anyway, I can then move it to GitHub which does allow Google to crawl the master branch.

–jeroen

via FastMM4 and lines in the *.dpr I’ve got an old problem, in which the IDE….

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 3, Delphi 4, Delphi 5, Delphi 6, Delphi 7, Delphi x64, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Development, Software Development | 5 Comments »

Delphi, C#, VB.NET and SQL all have escapes to use reserved words as identifiers

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/11/04

Normally you would not want to use a reserved word as an identifier. But sometimes it can be very convenient, for instance for a code generator that wraps remoting calls or does ORM.

Both Delphi and C# have an escape for this:

The prefixes are to tell the compiler knows you really know what you are doing, and are using a reserved word as an identifier.

The cool thing: in the Run Time Type Information (Delphi) or Reflection (C# and VB.NET) you will see the names without the prefix.

Some examples from StackOverflow: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, .NET 1.x, .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, C#, C# 1.0, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 8, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Development, Event, Jon Skeet, Software Development, VB.NET, VB.NET 10.0, VB.NET 11.0, VB.NET 7.0, VB.NET 7.1, VB.NET 8.0, VB.NET 9.0 | Leave a Comment »

Barry Kelly on how the Delphi Compiler used to be compiled (via: Google Groups)

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/10/23

not 100% accurate any more (now that the compiler gets more and more LLVM), but still accurate for most of the x86/x64 parts: Barry Kelly explaining how the Delphi compiler is built.

Some more of his posts.

–jeroen

via: Newbie question: What is the importance for a compiler to be able to compile itself? – Google Groups.

Posted in Delphi, 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, Development, Software Development | 2 Comments »

The Delphi MESSAGE directive: don’t forget quotes!

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 »

Files in your Delphi settings directory; How to relocate the Favourites on your Welcome page

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 »

Delphi: RandomizeIfNeeded

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 »

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