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 7’ Category

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Chr equivalent for Unicode in Delphi 7 – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/06/17

From a long time ago: [WayBack] chr equivalent for Unicode in Delphi 7 – Stack Overflow answered by David Heffernan:

Q

I need to initialize a Widestring in Delphi 7 but I can’t use chrfunction which is ANSI

var
  ws : Widestring;
begin

 ws := chr($FFFF) + chr($FFFF) + chr($FFFF);

end;

What can I use, then ?

A

I’m not sure there’s a simply way to do what you wish. You can convert a Word into a WideChar with a simple cast:

WideChar($FFFF)

but you cannot concatenate WideChar. So this is a compiler error:

WideChar($FFFF) + WideChar($FFFF)

You could use a helper function to get the job done:

function InitialiseWideString(const chars: array of Word): WideString;
var
  i: Integer;
begin
  SetLength(Result, Length(chars));
  for i := 0 to high(chars) do
    Result[i+1] := WideChar(chars[i]);
end;

Then you can call it like this:

ws := InitialiseWideString([$0054, $0069, $006D, $0065, $0020, $0074, $006F, 
  $0020, $0075, $0070, $0067, $0072, $0061, $0064, $0065]);

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 7, Development, History, Software Development | 3 Comments »

“Don’t access VCL from a background thread” – how to demo that?

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/07/11

When accessing the VCL from multiple threads at the same time: adopted from ...\DEMOS\THREADS\THRDDEMO.DPR

When accessing the VCL from multiple threads at the same time: adopted from …\DEMOS\THREADS\THRDDEMO.DPR

Great question a while ago:

[WayBack] “Don’t access VCL from a background thread” – how to demo that? – Primož Gabrijelčič – Google+

For me, the ultimate way why not to access the VCL from a background thread is the precursor of the official threads demo that ships from Delphi 2 to Delphi XE6 in ...DEMOS\THREADS\THRDDEMO.DPR. where you’d think the thread isolation would be in ...DEMOS\THREADS\ThSort.pas but actually is in ...DEMOS\THREADS\SortThds.pas.

The first public showing of that demo did not include main thread protection. It originates from a session at the the 1995 Borland Developers Conference where Ray Konopka showed the below code from Bob Ainsbury.

That session reminded why this joke [WayBack] Via the EKON20 sessions… – Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google+ was so funny:  “When Ray Konopka enters the room you have a Raize condition.“.

The question above also made me find back this reference to BorCon95 in San Diego:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 10 Seattle, Delphi 10.1 Berlin (BigBen), Delphi 10.2 Tokyo (Godzilla), 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 | 2 Comments »

Wizard to change Delphi Icon so it used the Projects’ Icon

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/04/05

Thomas Mueller (dummzeuch) – Google+ wrote this: [WayBack] Just an inspiration from attila kovacs (too many guys with this name on G+ to…:

A Delphi Wizard that adds a menu item so the Delphi Icon will change into the icon of the currently loaded project.

Can be useful if you have many Delphi instances open.

Source at [WayBack] http://pisil.de/bds_icon.txt

via: [WayBack] Is anybody able and have time to create an extension … change the icon with Application.Icon… – Attila Kovacs – Google+

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 10 Seattle, Delphi 10.1 Berlin (BigBen), Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 6, Delphi 7, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Delphi XE8, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Delphi: playing Chimes.wav as an external file or embedded WAVE resource in Delphi XE5.

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/10

As a by-effect, this article seems to one of the few that shows where Delphi uses the .dres file extension introduced around Delphi XE.

Recently I had to play some notification sounds in a Windows Delphi application where the application deployment should be as easy as possible: preferable copying the EXE around.

Playing a sound file seems easy, especially if it is a [WayBack] WAV file: just use the [WayBack] PlaySound or the (older) [WayBack] sndPlaySound API functions.

But if you start searching on the internet, you see lots of curious implementations for playing WAV resources through sndPlaySound.

The actual implementation is really really easy though, just make sure you follow the steps right and nothing can go wrong.

[WayBack] The full source code is on my BeSharp.net repository, here is how to to it step by step:

The steps depend on the MMSystem unit, so most of the code translates back to [WayBack] Turbo Pascal for Windows (yes, the 16-bit Pascal days when the MMSystem unit was introduced) with the exception of the SND_SENTRY flag.

The thing that more recent Delphi versions made a lot easier is embedding WAV files as WAVE resources, more on that further on. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Borland Pascal, 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, Development, Pascal, Software Development, Turbo Pascal | Leave a Comment »

Looking for more examples of Unicode/Ansi oddities in Delphi 2009+

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/09/25

At the end of April 2014, Roman Yankovsky started a nice [Wayback] discussion on Google+ trying to get upvotes for [Wayback] QualityCentral Report #:  124402: Compiler bug when comparing chars.

His report basically comes down to that when using Ansi character literals like #255, the compiler treats them as single-byte encoded characters in the current code page of your Windows context, translates them to Unicode, then processes them.

The QC report has been dismissed as “Test Case Error” (within 15 minutes of stating “need more info”) by one of the compiler engineers, directing to the [Wayback] UsingCharacterLiterals section of Delphi in a Unicode World Part III: Unicodifying Your Code where – heaven forbid – they suggest to replace #128 with the Euro-Sign literal.

I disagree, as the issue happens without any hint or warning whatsoever, and causes code that compiles fine in Delphi <= 2007 to fail in subtle ways on Delphi >= 2009.

The compiler should issue a hint or warning when you potentially can screw up. It doesn’t. Not here.

Quite a few knowledgeable Delphi people got involved in the discussion:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Ansi, ASCII, Conference Topics, Conferences, CP437/OEM 437/PC-8, Delphi, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 7, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Development, Encoding, Event, ISO-8859, Missed Schedule, QC, SocialMedia, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-8, Windows-1252, WordPress | Leave a Comment »

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