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

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QC overview

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/12

I wish I made WayBack copies when I drafted the below QC post last year sans [WayBack] links.

Edit 20171221: since QC is back up, I’ve archived the queries. I still have to archive the reports.

Some QC entries I forgot to archive:

Luckily I did archive most of the QC entries I posted about after november 2013.

About 11-thousand of 135-thousand entries are archived by now, in part of a script I tried to make early 2016 (but crashed after a few thousand entries):

https://web.archive.org/web//http://qc.embarcadero.com/wc/qcmain.aspx

About 5 thousand entries are here, but I’m not sure which ones are duplicate:

https://web.archive.org/web//http://qc.codegear.com/wc/

About 20 thousand entries are here, but I’m also not sure which ones are duplicate:

https://web.archive.org/web//http://qc.borland.com/wc/

–jeroen

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

QC does this logon call to http://qc.embarcadero.com/coBugCGI.exe/soap/ICDSReportPublicInterface

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/09

I drafted this in 2014 and given the recent QC news:

I was quite shocked to see that the Embarcadero QC client logs in over HTTP, not over HTTPS, especially since it passes the password in plain text.

QC does this logon call to http://qc.embarcadero.com/coBugCGI.exe/soap/ICDSReportPublicInterface:


POST http://qc.embarcadero.com/coBugCGI.exe/soap/ICDSReportPublicInterface HTTP/1.1
SOAPAction: "urn:CDSReportPublicInterfaceIntf-ICDSReportPublicInterface#Login"
Content-Type: text/xml; charset="utf-8"
User-Agent: Borland SOAP 1.1
Host: qc.embarcadero.com
Content-Length: 665
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
Pragma: no-cache
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/&quot; xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema&quot; xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance&quot; xmlns:SOAP-ENC="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"><SOAP-ENV:Body SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"><NS1:Login xmlns:NS1="urn:CDSReportPublicInterfaceIntf-ICDSReportPublicInterface"><EMail xsi:type="xsd:string">nobody@example.org</EMail><Passcode xsi:type="xsd:string">password</Passcode><ClientID xsi:type="xsd:string">QCWINCLNT</ClientID><BDN xsi:type="xsd:string">1</BDN></NS1:Login></SOAP-ENV:Body></SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

view raw

Embarcadero-QC-login-request.xml

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Time to cut down on my usage of QC.

–jeroen

via: QC does this logon call to http://qc.embarcadero.com/coBugCGI.exe/soap/ICDSReportPublicInterface.

Posted in Delphi, Development, QC, Security, Software Development | 3 Comments »

Why I care about QC and the Delphi community.

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/09

QC now forwards to QP and it is no longer possible to see your older open QC posts. Since the RAD Studio IDE still appear to report issues to QC – how can we now keep track of our submitted issues?

When will the internal error reporting in RAD Studio file reports to QP instead of QC?

[WayBack] – Lars Fosdal – Google+

in a response to

[WayBack] Quality Keeps Moving Forward – Community Blogs – Embarcadero Community

A few people wondered about my (QC) criticism and some mistakenly see this as frustration.

Not being an MVP any more allows me to continue voicing these, as I get these from fellow other Delphi developers and clients.

I’m not frustrated. I voice criticism on social media as I still deeply care about the Delphi community. They are entitled to excellent products and easily searched/obtained information, especially for less than current products as these are the ones that are still widely used and made Delphi great and Borland/Inprise/Embarcadero/Idera earn a lot of money. QC is an important part of that as it has input from a lot of knowledgeable people inside the Delphi community.

Of course I know that the Delphi team has lost a lot of valuable people and resources, their infrastructure is having difficulties (hence deleting forum posts, shutting down services and even suffer from outages every now and then for which I usually warned them shortly after they happened) and they have a truckload of things on their hands. But I hardly see them reach out to the community for any help, so there is not much I can guess on how they want to be helped.

Criticism that canalizes sentiments from parts of the community at least gives them a place to respond and help set things straight.

The reason I care about the Delphi community is that they still give me a big feeling of a kind of family helping each other.

Even being in the field for well over 20 years, I still find that there are lots of Delphi things I do not know or have forgotten. Asking around in the community in a proper way usually gets me going very quickly for the former. For the latter, I have wiert.me/category/development/software-development/delphi/ and Google Search.

I spent almost a day investigating which QC links I had already archived and which I didn’t. That’s the dedication I expect from the Delphi team as well.

BTW:

This is yet another reason to keep QC: even the Tokyo release notes refer to them: [WayBack] List of new features and customer reported issues fixed in RAD Studio 10.2 Tokyo.

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, QC, Software Development | 3 Comments »

curl Statistics Made Simple: httpstat

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/08

curl Statistics Made Simple: httpstat is a single file Python script that has no dependency and is compatible with Python 3.

Source: curl Statistics Made Simple: httpstat [WayBack]

via: Using curl to get the HTTP header, and httpstat script to add connection stats (timings) to it. – Jean-Luc Aufranc – Google+ [WayBack]

Source: Using curl to get the HTTP header, and httpstat script to add connection stats…

Posted in *nix, cURL, Development, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Mikrotik scripting language: a list of questions I had linking to the forum messages having answers

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/08

The RouterOS scripting language you can use on Mikrotik device immediately shows it’s origin: the console.

  • It is a statement oriented language where statement separators can be both semicolons and new-lines.
  • You can use the \ at the end-of the line as line-continuation character effectively spreading statements over multiple lines.

As promised some links to questions I asked:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Hardware, Internet, MikroTik, Network-and-equipment, Power User, RouterOS, routers, Scripting, Software Development, WinBox | 1 Comment »

Functions over read-only properties: you cannot mark a property as deprecated in delphi – via Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/07

I learned one of the reasons you might want to use functions instead of read-only properties from properties – How can I mark a property as deprecated in delphi? – Stack Overflow [WayBack]:

Delphi hinting directives: deprecated, experimental, library and platform cannot be used on properties but can be on other members (like fields, procedures and functions).

Since a read-only property is very much like a read-only field, but fields cannot be read-only it can make sense to replace the read-only property with a function. Then on the function you can place hint directives.

This can help enormously refactoring large code bases where – because of size – you cannot perform a certain replacement in one step.

–jeroen

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

APC 7xxx models, DHCP Option 43 and Mikrotik DHCP servers

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/07

When switching my DHCP to a Mikrotik CCR1009, both the AP7920 and AP7921 failed to get IP addresses. The APC7921 would look bounce between waiting and offered states like this:

The cause is the need of DHCP Option 43 (Vendor Class Identifier) specified in RFC2132 – based on [WayBack] RFC 2131 – Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and [WayBack] RFC 1533 – DHCP Options and BOOTP Vendor Extensions – which I found first via these links:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Internet, MikroTik, Power User, RouterOS, routers, Scripting, Software Development | 3 Comments »

Fiddler2 direct download

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/06

For automated installs that cannot have UI interaction:

The install is “per user” as it is a user-local application; it installs in %LocalAppData%\Programs\Fiddler\Fiddler.exe.

Docs

Note that Fiddler acts as a HTTP proxy. When Fiddler starts, it hooks itself into the default WinINET proxy (which is used by any tool using the WinINET API, including Edge, Internet Explorer, Chrome, but not FireFox).

If you kill your Windows machine before stopping Fiddler, it cannot restore the WinINET proxy, so you have to do that by hand (otherwise you cannot browse web pages any more).

Manual restore:

  1. Run "C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe" shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL inetcpl.cpl,,4
  2. Press “LAN settings” (Dutch: “LAN-Instellingen”)
  3. Uncheck the proxy server checkbox “Use a proxy server for your LAN” (Dutch “Een proxy-server voor uw LAN gebruiken”)
  4. Confirm
  5. Close the control panel wizard

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Fiddler, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Embarcadero QualityCentral is dead; man-decades of customer work down the drain

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/05

Without announcing an actual date, right before the weekend Embarcadero killed their [WayBack] QualityCentral publicly accessible and search engine indexed issue database.

So I wrote this on Google Plus:

Embarcadero just flushed down the drain man-decades of work and useful information. Mainly nilling the work done by their customers to document and inform about known issues, knowing search engines indexed it well and having some hope it would assist into maybe some getting resolved.

The documentation has not been updated and still references qc.embarcadero.com, for instance from [WayBack] docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Tokyo/en/Quality_Central

They say the web service is still up, but that likely will die at the snap of a finger as well. Besides, these links mentioned in QualityCentral web services guide are dead too:

These still work though:

So all is left are memories from the past. And dead links from Stack Overflow, blogs and other sites to a defunct repository.

Dead links: q=-site%3Aqc.embarcadero.com+qc.embarcadero.com%2Fwc%2Fqcmain.aspx even from for instance EDN: q=”qc.embarcadero.com”+site%3Aedn.embarcadero.com

Luckily some of the links have been saved in the WayBack machine: https://web.archive.org/web//http://qc.embarcadero.com/

It would have been better if Embarcadero had put some time to archive everything there.

I doubt they will. There was a habit of reclassifying bugs in QC as “feature requests” which continues in Quality Portal (which requires login and is not indexed by search engines so has way less value).

[WayBack] And here is why I think twice before spending time to report feature requests to QP. And even bugs/unexpected behavior are regularly being sweeped under the carpet reclassified as new feature… – Stefan Glienke – Google+

Memories:

Oh well, life goes on and relying on one development tool or vendor is never a good idea.

–jeroen

 

Posted in Delphi, Development, QC, Software Development | 18 Comments »

delphi – How do I parse a web URL? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/01

It looks like the platform-neutral TIdURI from Indy solves some corner cases that WinInet.InternetCrackUrl doesn’t.

Someday I’ll check it against the .NET Uri class and report back about this.

An addition, you might want to extend it as it lacks some features: Indy, TIdURI.PathEncode, URLEncode and ParamsEncode and more | Marc Durdin’s Blog [WayBack]

–jeroen

Source: delphi – How do I parse a web URL? – Stack Overflow

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

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