Posted by jpluimers on 2017/02/08
Be sure to read the details in Trying to recover from enhancement software that generates fake input incorrectly – The Old New Thing [WayBack] (much more Old New Think stuff below):
The most insightful part for me was this diagram listing where various methods enter the message pipeline (I added the GetMessage/PeekMessage entry):
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi-Tage.de, Development, Event, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/01/05
Something to remember: Delphi To Go: Include resource files in your Delphi build process
Note it’s not enough to add a line like this to your .dpr file:
{$R 'New1.res' 'New1.rc'}
The resources actually needs to be part of your .dproj file (which basically is an XML msbuild file adhering to the MSBuild Project File Schema Reference).
That way, the BrccCompile target in $(BDS)\bin\CodeGear.Delphi.Targets will automatically pick it up during build.
I just checked and these target files support BrccCompile:
...\Embarcadero\RAD Studio\7.0\bin\CodeGear.Delphi.Targets ...\Embarcadero\RAD Studio\8.0\bin\CodeGear.Delphi.Targets ...\Embarcadero\RAD Studio\9.0\bin\CodeGear.Delphi.Targets ...\Embarcadero\RAD Studio\10.0\bin\CodeGear.Delphi.Targets...\Embarcadero\RAD Studio\11.0\bin\CodeGear.Delphi.Targets...\Embarcadero\RAD Studio\12.0\bin\CodeGear.Delphi.Targets...\Embarcadero\Appmethod\13.0\bin\CodeGear.Delphi.Targets...\Embarcadero\Studio\14.0\bin\CodeGear.Delphi.Targets ...\Embarcadero\Studio\15.0\bin\CodeGear.Delphi.Targets ...\Embarcadero\Studio\16.0\bin\CodeGear.Delphi.Targets ...\Embarcadero\Studio\17.0\bin\CodeGear.Delphi.Targets ...\Embarcadero\Studio\18.0\bin\CodeGear.Delphi.TargetsWhich means it’s available as of Delphi 2007 until at least Delphi 10.1 Berlin and might even work in Delphi 2006
It could be a little bit flakey in Delphi 2007 (I’ve had many msbuild issues there) but more recent versions should be fine.
–jeroen
Related: I have a big file to add +’ at the beginning of a line and ‘ at the end…- shlomo abuisak – Google+
Posted in Delphi, Delphi 10 Seattle, Delphi 10.1 Berlin (BigBen), Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Delphi XE8, Development, Resource Files and Scripts (.res/.rc), Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/12/22
A while ago I bumped into [WayBack] Where can I get the glossary of Microsoft’s standard translations for computer terms? – The Old New Thing
Since I’m a non-digital pack-rat as well, I love [WayBack] this comment by [WayBack] Ian Boyd:
We have an *old* copy of the Microsoft Style Guide – an actual book. From that book i’ll always remember that e-mail has a hyphen in it.
I’ve that book too and write e-mail the same way.
But books are often hard to search through, so I love this list that [WayBack] Raymond Chen made:
- [WayBack] Microsoft Language Portal
- [WayBack] Interactive search
- [WayBack] Terminology collection
- [WayBack] Style guides
- [WayBack] Microsoft Language Portal Blog – News and updates for Microsoft users, customers and developers to efficiently localize software and services.
- [WayBack] User Interface Language Management (Windows)
I especially like the [WayBack] interactive search, but with any outcome, please remember that the context of your translation is very important.
For instance, I vividly remember a project some 20+ years ago where we had to translate the words “Close” and “Cancel” in the realm of the insurance business.
All guides indicated “Close” should become “Sluiten” which in that realm is colloquial for “Afsluiten” which means “to take out an insurance” implying a totally wrong action. Similarly “Cancel” translated to “Annuleren” which in the same realm would mean “to cancel an insurance”.
So we went for very specific translations narrowing down what exactly would happen in those screens, like:
–jeroen
Posted in Development, internatiolanization (i18n) and localization (l10), Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/12/07
In the continued “floating point code is hard for most software developers” series:
[WayBack] Why does the Windows calculator generate tiny errors when calculating the square root of a perfect square? – The Old New Thing
Because it doesn’t know that it’s a perfect square.
–jeroen
Posted in Algorithms, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Floating point handling, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/10/27
Slightly updated the answer the /D Y part will recursively accept taking ownership when directory listing is denied in the permissions:
To fix really broken permissions, the best is to run these two commands one after the other:
takeown /F /D Y "C:\path\to\folder" /R icacls "C:\path\to\folder" /reset /TThe first one will give you ownership of all the files, however that might not be enough, for example if all the files have the read/write/exec permissions set to “deny”. You own the files but still cannot do anything with them.
In that case, run the second command, which will fix the broken permissions.
via: permissions – recursively change owner windows 7 – Super User
–jeroen
Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9, Windows Development, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/07/07
via: Resource decompiler
One day I’m going to need ResourceHacker as it has an -extract option to extract resources.
The above link even has a batch file that can server as a start automating that process:
@echo off set file="GeneSys" if exist %file%.rc del %file%.rc ResHacker.exe -extract %file%.res, %file%.rc, Bitmap,, ResHacker.exe -extract %file%.res, temp.rc, Icon,, type temp.rc >>%file%.rc ResHacker.exe -extract %file%.res, temp.rc, Dialog,, type temp.rc >>%file%.rc ResHacker.exe -extract %file%.res, temp.rc, Menu,, type temp.rc >>%file%.rc ResHacker.exe -extract %file%.res, temp.rc, StringTable,, type temp.rc >>%file%.rc ResHacker.exe -extract %file%.res, temp.rc, Accelerators,, type temp.rc >>%file%.rc ResHacker.exe -extract %file%.res, temp.rc, VersionInfo,, type temp.rc >>%file%.rc del temp.rcI save it as
extract.batand a commandline usage:extract GeneSyswill extract all the resources fromGeneSys.res
–jeroen
PS: as the MASM forum sometimes nags with logins, I saved the above page in the wayback machine.
I’ve verified that [WayBack] ResourceHacker and the downloads ([WayBack] installer and [WayBack] portable) are there too.
Posted in Development, Resource Files and Scripts (.res/.rc), Software Development, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/02/12
For a short while (from Windows 2003 Service Pack 1 till Windows 2003 service pack 2) some updates used Windows Hotpatching.
Some links on the how/why and how to abuse it:
All because of this little post:
Hier ein Einblick in die Denkweise von Leuten, die Software auf CD-ROM verteilen und bei denen Release Zyklen in Monaten und nicht Minuten gemessen werd… – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+
–jeroen
Posted in C, Development, History, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/12/23
When adding Icons to your Windows applications a few things matter.
The icon selected by the Windows Shell (for modern Windows versions usually Windows Explorer), is the one with the lowest ID. When there is no icon with an ID, it selects the icon with the lowest name.
Icons in Windows can have both IDs and names. Even though API calls like LoadIcon have an lpIconName parameter, you can convert the ID to a name using MAKEINTRESOURCE.
There is a difference between the format of an ICO file and the icon resource (technically two things: RT_GROUP_ICON resource directory and an RT_ICON resource for each image) contains a list of icon images.
The selection process is on the RT_GROUP_ICON, and then within the group on the ICON itself.
For the RT_GROUP_ICON process, modern Windows versions still use the algorithm used by Windows 95 (not that by Windows NT):
Windows NT simply chooses the first resource listed in the application’s RC script. On the other hand, Windows 95’s algorithm is to choose the alphabetically first named group icon if one exists. If one such group resource does not exist, Windows chooses the icon with the numerically lowest identifier.
For a Delphi application the icon shown must be named MAINICON, since the below source fragment has been in TApplication.Create(…) like forever:
FIcon.Handle := LoadIcon(MainInstance, 'MAINICON');
Which means that if you want the Windows Shell (usually Explorer) to select that one, all other icon resources in your executable must have names that sort after MAINICON.
For the individual icon, the process is more complex. Even the summary is. To summarise the summary to select an icon for the requested size:
- Prefer the image closest in size.
- When more images of that size are present, match on the best color depth for the display.
- When no color depth matches, prefer the image with the greatest color depth not exceeding the color depth of the display.
- When all exceed the color depth, prefer the lowest color depth.
For color depth, treat 8 or more bits per pixel as equal. So there is no advantage of including a 16×16 256-color image and a 16×16 16-color image in the same resource — the system will simply choose the first one it encounters. When the display is in 8-bpp mode, the system will choose a 16-color icon over a 256-color icon, and will display all icons using the system default palette.
I’m not completely confident how 32-bit precisely fits in this scheme. If someone knows, please let me know and I’ll include the information.
I usually take 32-bit color images here which are actually True Color 24-bit + alpha channel RGBA images.
Actually there are a lot of sizes that Windows can request, and there are many articles about it, some of which contradict each other.
From what I assembled, these are the sizes you need to run on Windows XP / Server 2003 and up:
I might be wrong, so here are some links:
–jeroen
via:
Posted in .NET, Delphi, Development, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/12/15
Quite a while ago I learned about the clip.exe tool.
clip.exe is a nifty tool that allows you to copy console text output to the clipboard. Though shipping with Windows Server 2003, it wasn’t part of Windows XP, but as of Windows Vista it shipped on desktop versions of Windows.
Digging a bit deeper, I found out it was already part of the Windows NT 4 Resource Kit.
So I wrote PasteText:
PasteText: the reverse of clip.exe; pastes Clipboard.GetText() or Clipboard.GetFileDropList() to the standard output.
The full source code is below and in my repository.
There are many examples on the internet about Clipboard.GetText, but there is very little about Clipboard.GetFileDropList. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in .NET, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, C#, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, Development, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/07/01
Very interesting:
Kernel object names are optional. Don’t give them a name unless you intend them to be shared.
–jeroen
via: [WayBack] You can name your car, and you can name your kernel objects, but there is a qualitative difference between the two – The Old New Thing – Site Home – MSDN Blogs.
Posted in .NET, C, C++, Delphi, Development, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 