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’ Category

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Going Native – Malicious Native Applications

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/25

On the reading list wondering which tool chains can deliver NtAPI based development: [Wayback/Archive] Going Native – Malicious Native Applications

Via [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @MrPc69257431 on Thread Reader App with first tweet at

https://x.com/MrPc69257431/status/1864855379651498292

Note that being able to call NtAPI from your code base does not mean NtAPI based development: Pure NtAPI means you need a linker that can target a different output. See the quote from the above article (emphasis mine):

So, to get started with an empty native executable, all we have to do is include the “phnt.h” file, and set up the NtProcessStartup function. Then it’s important to tell the linker that we want to link against ntdll, and that we’ll be making a native application by passing in the “Native” text to the Subsystem linker option

It means that for instance Delphi is kind of out of the question for this, see these links on why:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, Software Development, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

Code52/carnac: A utility to give some insight into how you use your keyboard (on Windows systems)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/18

I unconsciously wanted a tool like this for a long time, and was glad I finally searched for it:

A keyboard logging and presentation utility for presentations, screencasts, and to help you become a better keyboard user.

[Wayback/Archive] Code52/carnac: A utility to give some insight into how you use your keyboard

The first time I saw something similar was in the Delphi days where it was part of a plugin for CodeRush in Delphi (think Delphi 5-6 era), the famous developer productivity tool by Mark Miller that later got rewritten for Visual Studio and became part of DevExpress.

So I searched for [Wayback/Archive] windows show keystrokes – Google Search which found [Wayback/Archive] How to show keystrokes on Windows 10 which in turn mentioned a fork of Carnac.

As it turns out Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, Delphi, Development, Hardware, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, KVM keyboard/video/mouse, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

Just released: the 2025 Annotated Edition of Mastering Delphi 5 by Marco Cantù

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/14

This just in: [Wayback/Archive] downloads.marcocantu.com/delphi5annotated.pdf

It has close to 200 annotations in some 300 pages plus a new preface, which is also at [Wayback/Archive] Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition

This brings the book current, but also showing how good Delphi is in backward compatibility.

Via:

  1. [Wayback/Archive] Marco Cantù: “Blog post “Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition” at blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2025-fe…” — Bluesky
  2. [Wayback/Archive] marcocantu.com-Books

--jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 5, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Delphi sorcery: Introducing Spring.Benchmark – a port of Google benchmark

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/14

On my list of tools to experiment with: [Wayback/Archive] Delphi sorcery: Introducing Spring.Benchmark – a port of Google benchmark

This got released while I was recovering from cancer procedures, to I totally missed it.

Interesting stuff, as I knew there was the Google benchmark library*, but since I hardly do any C++ work, I never used it.

* [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – google/benchmark: A microbenchmark support library

The source code for the Delphi based Spring.Benchmark library is at [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – spring4d/benchmark: Delphi port of Google Benchmark, especially [Wayback/Archive] benchmark/Spring.Benchmark.pas at master · spring4d/benchmark · GitHub.

Videos to watch before using it:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in C++, Delphi, Development, Profiling-Performance-Measurement, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Delphi Discord servers

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/09

Besides the Delphi Praxis servers (the [Wayback/Archive] German one has existed for what seems eternity, the [Wayback/Archive] English one took over the Google Plus Delphi group – see Google is sunsetting Google+ by August 2019; DelphiPraxis might start English forums and have RSS – and de-facto the dead Embarcadero forums as the old newsgroup servers went dead, and the new ones weren’t known for their high up-time [Wayback/Archive] community.embarcadero.com’s forums – General Help – Delphi-PRAXiS [en]), nowadays – with the shortened attention span of many people – Discord has a few Delphi servers as well:

They are chat based, and suffer from messages and threads disappearing, just like the Delphi newsgroups and forums suffered from, and archiving content can be difficult or impossible (not just because of the Wayback Machine being down).

Queries:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Chat, Delphi, Development, Discord, SocialMedia, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Old programming books had cool little “puns” in their references, modern lack them in their indices. On the why, and history of them.

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/01

I wrote a two earlier blog posts around puns in programming book indices before:

  1. the 1992 Turbo Pascal 7.0 Language Guide having both entry in the manual about Recursion (“recursive loop, see recursive loop”) which of course is similar to “infinite loop” and entries for “infinite loop See loop, infinite” and “loop, infinite See infinite loop”.
  2. infinite loop in “LaTeX: A Document Preparation System” by Leslie Lamport, printed in 1994.

In the last one, I promised to list more occurrences which I now finally had time for to do.

But let me first elaborate more on the observation that modern computer books (like for instance on C# and Delphi beyond version 1) lack these kinds of index pun.

On the Delphi side, the index entry joke for recursion got removed no later than Delphi 3 (I am still looking for a Delphi 2 version of the Object Pascal Language Guide, see further below) even before the book being fully redone electronically and the index pages generation being automated in

I think I even understand why that is: the process of creating of indices. By the start of this century, more and more indices were automatically being generated and for the last 2 decades or so, all of them are. Back in the days however, indices were mostly done by hand. Nowadays, with everything automated, it is actually pretty tricky in most environments to add such an “infinite loop” index entry like in the Turbo Pascal book, as it would require two things at once:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, C, C#, C++, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi 1, Delphi 2, Development, EKON, Event, History, LaTeX, LifeHacker, LISP, Mathematics, Pascal, Perl, PL/I (a.k.a. PL/1), Power User, science, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, Typesetting | Tagged: , | 4 Comments »

“Incompatible parameter lists” when using Types.T*DynArray? – VCL – Delphi-PRAXiS [en]

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/12/24

Reminder to self: Delphi 11.3 (Alexandria update 3), mid-product added a compiler changing kind of deprecating using types of this form (including ones defined in the System, System.Types and other RTL/VCL units):

Overview of “deprecated” * and alternative array types
“deprecated” alternative: write it all out
TBooleanDynArray TArray<Boolean>
TByteDynArray TArray<Byte>
TCardinalDynArray TArray<Cardinal>
TStringDynArray TArray<string>
  • technically not deprecated, as deprecated is a hinting directive and despite these having existed for almost 25 years now**, hinting directives like platform, deprecated, or library cannot be used on array types:a bug has been filed for this in 2017 but still has not been addressed, see my earlier blog post Delphi Declarations and Statements: Hinting Directives.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 11.0 Alexandria (Olympus), Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

If you sunset things, at least remove references: Finding information (IDE Tutorial) – RAD Studio

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/10/30

The sad thing about sunsetting useful resources is that usually a proper cleanup is not being performaned.

Take for instance QC: it died 7 years ago (Embarcadero QualityCentral is dead; man-decades of customer work down the drain) and is still mentioned in dozens of places including this prominent one: [Wayback/Archive] Finding information (IDE Tutorial) – RAD Studio.

This is just an example from a product I still love, so I know what is lost, but plenty of other companies forget they are the custodians of their own sites and leaving things rotting makes for a bad feeling of their overall behaviour.

It’s not hard to be not sloppy. Here are some 20+ more links to fix: [Wayback/Archive] “qc.embarcadero.com” site:embarcadero.com – Google Search

Note the next will be CodeCentral, which was annouced to get sunset 5 years ago:

People want to save this (see for instance [Wayback/Archive] EMBT: Code Central is going away – Tips / Blogs / Tutorials / Videos – Delphi-PRAXiS [en]), but regrettably companies aren’t going to do themselves it despite they owe it to their customers and their legacy.

--jeroen

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

string – Check if MyString[1] is an alphabetical character? – Stack Overflow (and how Embarcadero broke one of the product version neutral redirects)

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/24

Quite a while ago [Wayback/Archive] string – Check if MyString[1] is an alphabetical character? – Stack Overflow asked by [Wayback/Archive] User Jeff was answered by [Wayback/Archive] Andreas Rejbrand:

The simplest approach is

function GetAlphaSubstr(const Str: string): string;
const
  ALPHA_CHARS = ['a'..'z', 'A'..'Z'];
var
  ActualLength: integer;
  i: Integer;
begin
  SetLength(result, length(Str));
  ActualLength := 0;
  for i := 1 to length(Str) do
    if Str[i] in ALPHA_CHARS then
    begin
      inc(ActualLength);
      result[ActualLength] := Str[i];
    end;
  SetLength(Result, ActualLength);
end;

but this will only consider English letters as “alphabetical characters”. It will not even consider the extremely important Swedish letters Å, Ä, and Ö as “alphabetical characters”!

Slightly more sophisticated is

function GetAlphaSubstr2(const Str: string): string;
var
  ActualLength: integer;
  i: Integer;
begin
  SetLength(result, length(Str));
  ActualLength := 0;
  for i := 1 to length(Str) do
    if Character.IsLetter(Str[i]) then
    begin
      inc(ActualLength);
      result[ActualLength] := Str[i];
    end;
  SetLength(Result, ActualLength);
end;

Back in 2011 I added a comment that for more than a decade would redirect to the most current documentation on the IsLetter method:

+1 for using IsLetter which checks the Unicode definition for being a letter or not [Wayback] docwiki.embarcadero.com/VCL/en/Character.TCharacter.IsLetter

Back then, Delphi X2 was current, so it would redirect

  1. from [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/VCL/en/Character.TCharacter.IsLetter
  2. to [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/VCL/XE2/en/Character.TCharacter.IsLetter
  3. then to [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/VCL/XE2/en/Character.TCharacter.IsLetter
  4. ending at [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/XE2/en/System.Character.TCharacter.IsLetter

After a long outage in 2022 (see The Delphi documentation site docwiki.embarcadero.com has been down/up oscillating for 4 days is now down for almost a day.) only the Alexandria help was restored.

This killed the above redirect.

Luckily [Wayback/Archive] George Birbilis noticed that and commented this:

@JeroenWiertPluimers the correct link now is: docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Alexandria/en/…

In order to refer to the most recent Delphi version, now you have to use [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/en/System.Character.TCharacter.IsLetter.

This redirects:

  1. via [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Alexandria/en/System.Character.TCharacter.IsLetter to
  2. to [Wayback] https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Alexandria/en/System.Character.TCharacter.IsLetter

The above breaks the help integration from older Delphi products which is bad. It is also bad because it makes it harder to port legacy Delphi code to more modern Delphi versions.

Hopefully the above gives you a bit insight how the docwiki help system was designed and what is left of that design.

–jeroen

Posted in Communications Development, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Encryption, Event, HTML, HTTP, https, HTTPS/TLS security, Internet protocol suite, Power User, Security, Software Development, TCP, TLS, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Interesting thread on the usefulness of running a syslog server and being able to write to it

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/07/04

For my link archive:

  1. [Wayback/Archive] jilles.com 🔜 MCH2022 🏳️‍🌈 on Twitter: “My Ubiquity setup stopped working (again). This happens way to often in my opinion. I have setup a monitoring environment to debug the issues and consider it not reliable enough for the amount of money I spend on it.”

  2. [Wayback/Archive] Rick on Twitter: “@jilles_com Waar heb je problemen mee? En ik tijdelijk een syslog server draaien. Dan je kun je gemakkelijker de logs doorspitten (kiwi heeft een simpele gratis versie)”
  3. [Wayback/Archive] jilles.com on Twitter: “@RickvanSoest Ik draai een grafana setup met syslog, snmp ingest en een losse traceroute om uit te sluiten of het aan de provider of de hardware ligt.”
  4. [Wayback/Archive] jilles.com on Twitter: “@RickvanSoest Software upgrades die falen. In dit geval een PoE switch die op z’n gat lag. In dit geval iets dat met een reboot gefixt is. Maar in geval van de upgrade was het een compleet nieuwe configuratie.”

In todays cross-platform world, it pays if your tooling can send logging to syslog.

Though originating from the CP/M and SunOS background, I have done most of my professional development work in Windows back-ends and front-ends, so here are some links relevant to that:

--jeroen

Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, Software Development, Source Code Management, Subversion/SVN | 2 Comments »

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