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

No, no, no, noooooo! – A Modern Hungarian Notation – Pixplicity

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/24

Some people still don’t get it:

We like to keep our code organized for readability, and use Hungarian Notation as prefixes where they clarify the purpose of a variable.

Source: A Modern Hungarian Notation – Pixplicity

My opinion on this:

  • Don’t abbreviate. There is code completion for a reason.
  • Put technical meanings at the end and functional meanings at the start of identifiers: software development is about functional stuff, not about technical stuff as the latter changes way faster than the former.
  • You might consider using prefixes for arguments, local variables, instance variables and such, but often that works against you while refactoring stuff.

Been there, done that (;

Source: Boy, there sure is a lot of discussion about Hungarian Notation!

–jeroen

Posted in Conventions, Development, Naming Conventions, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Some interesting Delphi posts by Stefan Glienke – Spring4D maintainer

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/23

One of the Delphi programmers I keep an eye on is [WayBackStefan Glienke, the maintainer of the great Spring4D Delphi framework at spring4d.org.

His blog posts come in bursts, though his G+ posts are spreaded a bit more evenly.

Some of his recent posts and references:

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

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

What to change after a fresh Delphi (RAD Studio) installation…

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/23

Reminder to self: document what I change, and borrow some from this interesting thread:

Just curious, what do you change after installing Studio? During all these (21!) years, the only thing I change is the editor keyboard settings to… – David Berneda – Google+

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Wow, this parses in Delphi: `property Foo: string index 0 string read GetFoo;`

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/18

Quite a few interesting entries got posted after I published this compiler glitch:

Wow, this parses:

property Foo: string index 0 string read GetFoo;

Note the extra “string”.

Found this in an old piece of code so it must have been uncaught by the compiler for quite a while.

– Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google+

Some:

property DepartmentName: string index 0 program library uses unit interface string class read GetCustomDataX;

property Foo: string index 0 unit if library uses unit do not inline file else raise object if is nil read GetFoo;

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, Fun, Software Development | 2 Comments »

Anders Hejlsberg on Modern Compiler Construction | Seth Juarez | Channel 9

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/18

One of those “must watch” videos if you are remotely or more interested in how compilers influence our day to day coding activities.

The Red Dragon Book, first edition: Compilers. Principles, Techniques and Tools.

The Red Dragon Book, first edition: Compilers. Principles, Techniques and Tools.

It starts out with referring to the Dragon Book (well, actually the first edition of the Red Dragon Book, as there are three) describing the compilers as having front-ends consisting of a Lexer, Parser and Type Checker and back-ends consisting of Code Generator and Emitter. A full compilation is going through all five stages and there is an increasing cost using these traditional stages when going from syntax highlighting via collapsible regions to red squiggles and code completion will need to go further along those stages taking an increasing time – like seconds or even longer – whereas the user experience requires responses in ~ 100 milliseconds where his code might not even compile in the first place.

Then Anders goes on describing Roslyn, TypeScript and Compiler API JSON interfaces to them so you can run them as a service and keep compiler state, rebuilding just enough of the state on source code changes. He goes on talking about how Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Command-Line Compiler, Sublime Text and other tools (can) use these APIs to interact with the compiler so it keeps state of slowly evolving code of which the tools than can emit what they need.

Anders explains this much better and much more visually than I do: so it’s a highly recommended video.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Development, Software Development | 2 Comments »

Delphi Corner Weblog: New: Velthuis.AutoConsole unit – helps against the “optimised” Embarcadero FastMM fork.

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/17

Brilliant:

if it is a console program and it was started any other way (from the Windows Explorer, from the Delphi IDE with or without debugger, from another non-console program), then, before the console window can close, it will display:

Press any key...

Source: Delphi Corner Weblog: New: Velthuis.AutoConsole unit [WayBack]

via:

–jeroen

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

If you were using Managed / IManaged in Spring4D, be aware they got renamed to Shared / IShared

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/17

Sometimes changes are breaking. In this case it’s a Spring4D change: https://bitbucket.org/sglienke/spring4d/commits/a7c9bc92f30f7b5ec71b4905c1f0d97339b3c807

It renames Managed / IManaged to Shared / IShared and introduces compatibility with weak references.

Together they are the Spring4D manifestation of smart pointers about which I wrote a few times before:

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | 1 Comment »

Bitbucket – when you suddenly cannot login with git username/password from git any more

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/16

When logging in using the Web UI with a username

When logging in using the Web UI with a username

As of a few days, I was getting this error in my SourceTree output when pushing to git :

remote: Invalid username or password. If you log in via a third party service you must ensure you have an account password set in your account profile.

I think this is at least related to a change Bitbucket made 2 years ago for their site logon:

You can no longer log in with a username. Use your Atlassian account email address instead.

Source: Bitbucket

Pushing to bitbucket with cached credentials from SourceTree has worked for months. One thing that was different now (and should have given me a clue) the broken [WayBack] broken Git Credentials Manager popup showed but should not have.

When you get this credential manager you have to escape it as otherwise you will get an “Empty password” error.

Broken Git Credential Manager for Windows

Broken Git Credential Manager for Windows

Initially I blamed the error on the SourceTree 2.x upgrade I did last week. Unlike previous upgrades, this one had kept the old version (in my case 1.9.13.7) around and after a few clicks (skipping the “go to download page” prompt forever) and closing SourceTree 2.0, I fas able to start SourceTree 1.9 again.

SourceTree 1.9 had the same problem which meant it was either git itself, or the Bitbucket back-end.

To prove it was the Bitbucket back-end, I did everything An example of this is in the output below.

Solving the problem

What helped were these steps:

  1. Change the git repository from https://jeroenp@bitbucket.org/jeroenp/fastmm.git to
    https://bitbucket.org/jeroenp/fastmm.git
  2. Change the “username” field for the bitbucket repository to be my email address.
  3. Remove any bitbucket cached credentials from SourceTree.
  4. Restart SourceTree.
  5. Performing a push
  6. Cancel the Git Credential Manager popup
  7. Use my primary bitbucket email address for logon

Now SourceTree happily cached my credentials.

I’ve used this to scan the git config files for ones starting with a username:

grep -inSwl jeroenp@bitbucket config

Notes:

From the console

Reproduction of the issue:

C:\Users\jeroenp\Versioned\FastMM>git --version
git version 2.12.2.windows.1

C:\Users\jeroenp\Versioned\FastMM>git -c diff.mnemonicprefix=false -c core.quotepath=false push -v --tags --set-upstream bitbucket develop:develop
Pushing to https://jeroenp@bitbucket.org/jeroenp/fastmm.git
Logon failed, use ctrl+c to cancel basic credential prompt.
Password for 'https://jeroenp@bitbucket.org/':
remote: Invalid username or password. If you log in via a third party service you must ensure you have an account password set in your account profile.
fatal: Authentication failed for 'https://jeroenp@bitbucket.org/jeroenp/fastmm.git/'

This has worked for months (after [WayBack] canceling the Git Credentials Manager popup as that has been broken for a very long time and gives you a remote: Empty password).

What helped was this:

C:\Users\jeroenp\Versioned\FastMM>git -c diff.mnemonicprefix=false -c core.quotepath=false push -v --tags --set-upstream bitbucket develop:develop
Pushing to https://bitbucket.org/jeroenp/fastmm.git
Logon failed, use ctrl+c to cancel basic credential prompt.
Username for 'https://bitbucket.org/': jeroen...@....com
Password for 'https://jeroen...@....comcom@bitbucket.org/':
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
POST git-receive-pack (196 bytes)
remote:
remote: Create pull request for develop:
remote:   https://bitbucket.org/jeroenp/fastmm/pull-requests/new?source=develop&t=1
remote:
To https://bitbucket.org/jeroenp/fastmm.git
   xxxxxxxx..xxxxxxxx  develop -> develop
updating local tracking ref 'refs/remotes/bitbucket/develop'
Branch develop set up to track remote branch develop from bitbucket.

–jeroen

 

 

Posted in BitBucket, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

On the design of the Delphi TStream classes – why aren’t they decomposed better?

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/16

Ever since I started using Delphi more than 2 decades ago, I wondered about the design of the TStream classes, especially as “stream16.zip” by Duncan Murdoch from the DOS Turbo Pascal era (which I copied in the below gist) showed how to perform composition using streams.

Even though by now there is TStreamReader/TStreamWriter allowing some level of composition, it always bugged me that large parts of the resource handling and component (de)serialisation is in it (centred around ReadComponentRes/WriteComponentRes in stead of fully being in TFiler/TReader/TWriter or even further decomposed), that you cannot interrogate capabilities (like supporting seeking, length, directionality and such) and that a lot of overloads (for instance Read/ReadBuffer/ReadBufferData/Write/WriteBuffer/WriteBufferData) are still based on signed or 32-bit types (though it has improved back in the early days they were even signed 16-bit types).

I’m not the only one who wonders about this: Faster FileStream with TBufferedFileStream • DelphiABall mentioned a new Berlin piece the TStream hierarchy and – being in the field a lot longer – Stefan Glienke rightly asked why the buffering isn’t done with the decorator pattern like JclStreams does, and Asbjørn Heid chimed in with a very dense version of more gripes.

Even TZCompressionStream/TZDecompressionStream (though relatively new) aren’t doing composition really well (by not abstracting the compression/decompression from the write-only/read-only behaviour).

Now that all key players from the early TStream design day and age have left the core Delphi R&D team, maybe one of them can step in and explain why.

–jeroen

via: [WayBack] I was wondering if the TBufferedFileStream (see https://delphiaball.co.uk/2016/04/29/faster-filestream-tbufferedfilestream/) would not have been implemented using the decorator pattern… – Stefan Glienke – Google+ -> https://github.com/project-jedi/jcl/blob/master/jcl/source/common/JclStreams.pas#L207

TJclBufferedStream = class(TJclStreamDecorator)

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | 2 Comments »

git encoding trouble: recursively removing a directory where git prints out a different name than it accepts

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/11

The story so far:

A few years back I put all my conferences material in a GitHub repository https://github.com/jpluimers/Conferences/. There were a lot directories and files so I didn’t pay much attention to the initial check-in list. The files had been part of copy.com syncing between Windows and Mac machines.

Often git on a Mac is a bit easier than on Windows (on a Mac you can install them with the xcode-select --install trick which installs only the Command Line Tools without having to install the full Xcode [WayBack]).

I choose a Mac because it is closer to a Linux machine than Widows so I expected no encoding trouble (as git has a Linux origin: it “was created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 for development of the Linux kernel“).

Boy I was wrong:

Recently I cloned the repository in a different place and found out a few strange things:

  1. Directories with accented characters had been duplicated, for instance in https://github.com/jpluimers/Conferences/tree/master/2011
    1. …/EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-D%FCsseldorf
    2. …/EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-Düsseldorf
  2. Beyond Compare would show the same content
  3. After a check-out git would not understand the %FC encoded directory name (%FC is IEC_8859-1 encoding for ü and \374 is the octal representation of 0xFC [WayBack]) and a git status would show stuff like this:
    • Untracked files:
        (use "git add ..." to include in what will be committed)
      
          EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-D%FCsseldorf/

      or

      deleted: "EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-D\374sseldorf/Delphi-XE2-Debugging/BO-EKON15-Delphi-XE2-Debugging.pdf"
  4. A git rm -r --cached call [WayBack] would not work, as both these would fail:
    • $ git rm -r --cached EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-D%FCsseldorf
      fatal: pathspec 'EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-D%FCsseldorf' did not match any files
      

      and

      $ git rm -r --cached "EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-D\374sseldorf"
      fatal: pathspec 'EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-D\374sseldorf' did not match any files
      
  5. a

So git could:

  • detect the directories and files
  • display the names of the detected directories and files
  • not translate back the specified names into directories and files

All if this was with:

$ git --version
git version 1.9.5 (Apple Git-50.3)

This is how I fixed it

First I created an alias:

alias git-config="echo global: ; git config --list --global ; echo local: ; git config --lis --local ; echo system: ; git config --list --system"

That allowed me to view the git settings on various levels in my system.

It revealed I didn’t have the core.precomposeunicode setting at all (valid values are true or false). I also read various stories about one or both being the correct value: osx – Git and the Umlaut problem on Mac OS X – Stack Overflow [WayBack].

 

 

–jeroen

Result of git status:


$ git status .
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes not staged for commit:
(use "git add/rm <file>…" to update what will be committed)
(use "git checkout — <file>…" to discard changes in working directory)
deleted: "EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-D\374sseldorf/Delphi-XE2-Debugging/BO-EKON15-Delphi-XE2-Debugging.pdf"
deleted: "EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-D\374sseldorf/Delphi-XE2-Unit-Testing/BO-EKON15-Delphi-XE2-Unit-Testing.pdf"
deleted: "EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-D\374sseldorf/Delphi-XE2-Workshop/BO-EKON15-2011-XE2-Wokshop-0-sample-code.txt"
deleted: "EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-D\374sseldorf/Delphi-XE2-Workshop/BO-EKON15-2011-XE2-Wokshop-1-Delphi-64bit.pdf"
deleted: "EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-D\374sseldorf/Delphi-XE2-Workshop/BO-EKON15-2011-XE2-Wokshop-2-LiveBindings-DataBinding.pdf"
deleted: "EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-D\374sseldorf/Delphi-XE2-Workshop/BO-EKON15-2011-XE2-Wokshop-3-Delphi-VCL Styles.pdf"
deleted: "EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-D\374sseldorf/Delphi-XE2-Workshop/BO-EKON15-2011-XE2-Wokshop-4-Delphi-FireMonkey.pdf"
deleted: "EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-D\374sseldorf/Delphi-XE2-Workshop/BO-EKON15-2011-XE2-Wokshop-5-Delphi-FireMonkey-xPlatform.pdf"
deleted: "EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-D\374sseldorf/Delphi-XE2-and-XML/BO-EKON15-2011-Delphi-XE2-and-XML.pdf"
deleted: "EKON15-Renaissance-Hotel-D\374sseldorf/XSL-transforming-XML/BO-EKON15-2011-XSL-transforming-XML.pdf"

 

Posted in Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Encoding, git, ISO-8859, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »