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 ‘Software Development’ Category

performance – How can I produce high CPU load on Windows? – Super User

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/28

Reminder to self: [WayBack] performance – How can I produce high CPU load on Windows? – Super User

Poor-mans-solution is a batch file filling one core:

@echo off
:loop
goto loop

To stop, press Ctrl+C in the console.

Far easier is [WayBack] Tools To Simulate CPU / Memory / Disk Load – The Way I See It:

There is an old SysInternals tool from 1996 called “CPU Stress” that still works. (I just tried it on my Windows 10 laptop.)

Custom CPU load

It’s GUI based and allows you to run up to four threads at custom intensities. This allows you to tune the desired CPU load. As a rule of thumb: One thread with Activity set to Maximum will consume about 25% CPU. So as an example: If you run three threads at Maximum, your CPU load goes to about 75%.

Portable

CPUSTRES.EXE is a portable download and does not require installation.

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Software Development, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

Optional sort by name in `LogMemoryManagerStateToFile` · Issue #64 · pleriche/FastMM4 · GitHub

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/27

If not done yet, try to improve this: [WayBack] Optional sort by name in LogMemoryManagerStateToFile · Issue #64 · pleriche/FastMM4 · GitHub

–jeroen

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

shell – How do I grep for multiple patterns with pattern having a pipe character? – Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/27

Since I keep forgetting this – especially because I cannot remember the “why”: [WayBack] shell – How do I grep for multiple patterns with pattern having a pipe character? – Unix & Linux Stack Exchange by “user unknown“.

The -E means using Regular expression: POSIX extended – Wikipedia.

egrep "foo|bar" *.txt

or

grep "foo\|bar" *.txt
grep -E "foo|bar" *.txt

selectively citing the man page of gnu-grep:

   -E, --extended-regexp
          Interpret PATTERN as an extended regular expression (ERE, see below).  (-E is specified by POSIX.)

Matching Control
   -e PATTERN, --regexp=PATTERN
          Use PATTERN as the pattern.  This can be used to specify multiple search patterns, or to protect  a  pattern
          beginning with a hyphen (-).  (-e is specified by POSIX.)

(…)

   grep understands two different versions of regular expression syntax: basic and extended.”  In  GNU grep,  there
   is  no  difference  in  available  functionality  using  either  syntax.   In  other implementations, basic regular
   expressions are less powerful.  The following description applies to extended regular expressions; differences  for
   basic regular expressions are summarized afterwards.

In the beginning I didn’t read further, so I didn’t recognize the subtle differences:

Basic vs Extended Regular Expressions
   In basic regular expressions the meta-characters ?, +, {, |, (, and ) lose their special meaning; instead  use  the
   backslashed versions \?, \+, \{, \|, \(, and \).

I always used egrep and needlessly parens, because I learned from examples. Now I learned something new. :)

–jeroen

Posted in Development, RegEx, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

delphi – Can I use an Edit Mask to format output? (not just validate input) – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/27

From a while ago, and – being on the back-end side mostly – I sometimes forget: [WayBack] delphi – Can I use an Edit Mask to format output? (not just validate input) – Stack Overflow

You can use the TField.OnGetText event or TNumericField.DisplayFormat property to modify how the text is being displayed.

Since you have a TStringField holding numbers, you have two choices:

  • use a TNumericField and the DisplayFormat property
  • use the OnGetText event and do your own string formatting

Edit:

Sam used this approach:

I implemented OnSetText and OnGetText event handlers. I already had the Edit Mask 9999 9999 9999 9999;1;_ so the OnSetText was just

TStringField(Sender).Value := Trim(Text);

and OnGetText was just

sValue := TStringField(Sender).Value;  
Text := Format('%s %s %s %s', [Copy(sValue, 1, 4), Copy(sValue, 5, 4), Copy(sValue, 9, 4), Copy(sValue, 13, 4)]);

It works fine. Thanks.

–jeroen

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

My toolkit – Roald’s blog

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/22

Always interesting to see what others put on their Windows development systems, for instance: [WayBack] My toolkit – Roald’s blog

Everytime I (re)install my development computer I need to think about all the tools I need and use on a regular basis. For that reason, and maybe to inspire others, here’s my list of essentia…

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Delphi, Development, Software Development, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

delphi – How to convert a null terminated string to string? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/22

An old trick that I tend to forget: [WayBack] delphi – How to convert a null terminated string to string? – Stack Overflow:

You can assign a null-terminated PChar directly to a String:

function GetFileName(DiskName: TFileNameIO): string;
begin
 Result := PChar(@DiskName);
end;

It can work even on string literals and constants, where you can leave out the @, like in:

var
  S: string;
begin
  S := PChar(FastMM4Messages.LogFileExtension;

Probably time to update the unit I mention in ISO 8601 Date, Time and DateTime in Delphi (was: Simple example to show DateTime.Now in ISO 8601 format on ideone.com | Online C# Compiler & Debugging Tool).

–jeroen

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

Automated testing Windows applications using Katalon and WinAppDriver

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/21

[WayBack] Top 45 Best Automation Testing Tools Ultimate List • Test Automation Made Easy: Tools, Tips & Training Awesomeness A few notes, partially related to Enable your device for development – UWP app developer | Microsoft Docs.

One research project I had a while ago, was to see how it was possible to use a generic testing tool like Katalon Studio (that can test many platforms), for testing Windows applications.

Katalon uses a Selenium interface that normally is used for web applications through the [WayBack] WebDriver protocol (formerly [WayBack] JsonWireProtocol) that continues to be updated: [WayBack] draft upcoming WebDriver protocol, which is more generic than just web applications:

Read the rest of this entry »

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

RDP logon while other user is logged on: no way to automate automatic disconnect/logoff

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/21

One of the dreaded things when logging on using RDP is that if another user is logged on, you have to first indicate you want to indeed logon (if you don’t, the RDP connection will close after some 15-30 seconds), then wait for their approval time-out before you can logon.

As of writing there is no way around this.

Some links that helped me conclude this:

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

Delphi: get timestamp as ISO8601 string for use in filenames

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/21

On Windows, filenames do not like some characters (including : and +), so this is a quick way to get a timestamp into ISO8601 format that is compatible with filenames.

TimeStamp := Now();
StartIso8601String := DateToISO8601(TimeStamp, False).Replace('-', '').Replace(':', '') // https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Time_zone_designators

It Depends on the [WayBackSystem.DateUtils unit which had the [WayBackDateToISO8601 function [Archive.isadded in Delphi XE6.

A poor man’s solution (that skips timezones altogether) is this one:

FormatDateTime('yyyymmdd''T''hhnnss''.''zzz', TimeStamp); // note quoted T and ., as otherwise they will be expanded.

–jeroen

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

Enable your device for development – UWP app developer | Microsoft Docs

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/20

From [WayBack] Enable your device for development – UWP app developer | Microsoft Docs:

Run these as administrator on the command prompt to:

Enable Sideloading

reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\AppModelUnlock" /t REG_DWORD /f /v "AllowAllTrustedApps" /d "1"

Enable Developer Mode

reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\AppModelUnlock" /t REG_DWORD /f /v "AllowDevelopmentWithoutDevLicense" /d "1"

Needed for WinAppDriver to test applications from Selenium or Katalon

When you run WinAppDriver without it, you get this:

C:\Users>"C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Application Driver\WinAppDriver.exe"
Failed to initialize: 0x80004005
Despite WinAppDriver running fine as non-administrative user, the reason was given that it requires administrative privileges: [WayBack] Why does WinAppDriver.exe require developer mode? · Issue #165 · Microsoft/WinAppDriver · GitHub.

SetCapabilities name parameters and values

Various searches for what to pass as parameters to SetCapabilities failed, but the list is right at the README, but without any mention SetCapabilities, so search engines miss it with for instance “SetCapabilities” “WinAppDriver” – Google Search that only returned these links:

Supported Capabilities

Below are the capabilities that can be used to create Windows Application Driver session.

Capabilities Descriptions Example
app Application identifier or executable full path Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe!MicrosoftEdge
appArguments Application launch arguments https://github.com/Microsoft/WinAppDriver
appTopLevelWindow Existing application top level window to attach to 0xB822E2
appWorkingDir Application working directory (Classic apps only) C:\Temp
platformName Target platform name Windows
platformVersion Target platform version 1.0

–jeroen

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