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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Delphi 8’ 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 »

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 »

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 »

Delphi hinting directives: deprecated, experimental, library and platform

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 »

JEDI.INC got updated a few months ago: Delphi XE7 seems to be ahead…

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/08/22

While updating a project to a more recent version of Delphi, I also updated the JEDI.INC reference.

Note that since writing Delphi – finding the VERxxx define for a particular Delphi version: use JEDI.INC, the Delphi JEDI project moved from SoureForge to GitHub.

The fun thing: JEDI.INC got updated a few months ago to support Delphi XE7 provisionally.

Given the Delphi release cycle of twice a year, the Delphi Carpathia aka XE7 rumours this summer, I presume Delphi XE7 is near because of:

By then the list of Delphi Versionen | Delphi-Treff will likely also be updaed.

I’m anxious to see if the (Dutch + English) BIG Delphi Conference organized by Barnsten and Blaise from September 11-12 in the Netherlands will be part of the launch tour.

Anyway: here is the JEDI.INC portion with defines:     Read the rest of this entry »

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 | 6 Comments »

Delphi and C++ Builder VCL Library Buffer Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/08/19

Since this did not make it to DelphiFeeds yet: I’ve seen the function PaletteFromDIBColorTable in Graphics.pas go back as far at least until Delphi 2006, and references on the web as far back as Delphi 4.

So: this bug is old, but as it is a security one, make sure you patch soon.

For Delphi XE6, download 29913 BMP Buffer Overflow hotfix – Delphi, C++Builder, RAD Studio XE6.

For older Delphi versions, read this piece that was adapted from the EDN article Delphi and C++ Builder VCL Library Buffer Overflow:

For users of prior versions of Delphi and C++Builder: these steps should be followed to modify the VCL source code and add it to your application.

For each application:

  1. Add the modified Edit Vcl.Graphics.pas or Graphics.pas or Borland.Vcl.Graphics.pas to your project
  2. For C++Builder: Under Project | Options | Packages | Runtime Packages, set “Link with runtime packages” to false
  3. Rebuild your application

Once for the native VCL and .NET VCL:

  • Note: Variable names and scoping might be slightly different depending on your product version.
  1. Edit Vcl.Graphics.pas or Graphics.pas or Borland.Vcl.Graphics.pas
  2. Locate the function PaletteFromDIBColorTable.
  3. Add the following code just before the line assigning a value to Pal.palNumEntries when the DIBHandle = 0
    if ColorCount > 256 then 
  InvalidGraphic{$IFNDEF CLR}@{$ENDIF}SInvalidBitmap;;

–jeroen

via Delphi and C++ Builder VCL Library Buffer Overflow.

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 4, Delphi 5, Delphi 6, Delphi 7, Delphi 8, Delphi x64, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Development, Software Development | Tagged: , , , | 5 Comments »

The dreaded with… Debugging today, I found another gotcha (: – via: Lars Fosdal

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/08/12

In the With Statement series:

Lars Fosdal – Code Rants

The dreaded with…

Debugging today, I found another gotcha.

In this case, both Self and DisconnectedClient has a property named ClientIdentifier.

Note the difference for the mouse-over and the evaluation.

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

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

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