Archive for the ‘Conference Topics’ Category
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/03/06
If you run FastMM4 in FullDebugMode, then here are two tips that new (and sometimes existing users) often overlook:
- If you set the
FullDebugMode directive in the IDE, build your project.
- Don’t forget to give your EXE access to FastMM_FullDebugMode.dll (x86), or FastMM_FullDebugMode64.dll (x64) which are stored in the FastMM4 download and in the precompiled directory of the source code.
Either put that DLL in your path, or copy it to your EXE directory.
- Make sure your EXE can write in the directory of the EXE.
The first makes sure all units are compiled with FullDebugMode (Delphi does not always do that automagically).
The second makes sure your EXE can access the DLL that writes out your *MemoryManager_EventLog.txt file containing memory leaks and other issues FastMM4 detected.
–jeroen
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Development, Event, FastMM, Software Development | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/01/10
Ever since around Delphi 2007, it started to use temporary .VRC files to re-build the project .RES file.
It confuses people, and with reason as the only public information about it on the dockwiki seems to be in the Version Info page (though there is more on the other embarcadero sites).
The reason is that parts of the .RES file are no more leading in the process of getting them from your project options to the final binary (EXE/DLL/BPL/…) of your project.
Delphi XE3 for instance can have these resource structures in the .VRC file:
Except for type 24, Delphi XE2 seems to have the same kinds of resource types.
All in all, most if not all of the .RES files are being auto-generated for at least a couple of years now so there is less and less need to put it under version control.
The problem is that if for one reason or the other, your project .RES file becomes readonly, and you get errors like mentioned in Why does a projects res file need to ….
[BRCC32 Error] xxx.vrc(1): error creating xxx.res
.RES in VCS or not?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Development, Event, QC, Resource Files and Scripts (.res/.rc), Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/01/04
Hadn’t been doing SOAP in Delphi for a while, and needed to send some Delphi data structures over the write where both Client and Server were going to be Delphi.
These links helped me:
If both client and server are Delphi, you can share the interface units and registration.
Note: since native Delphi SOAP support uses old-skool RTTI, so any property you want to go over the wire needs to be published, not public.
If you want to go beyond that, or use other protocols than SOAP, use libraries for Delphi like RemObjects SDK.
–jeroen
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/08/14
Everyone knows there is a size difference between a gigabyte of memory, and a gigabyte of disk space.
The former is 102410241024, the latter is 100010001000.
To facilitate this, I’ve created a C# class UnitPrefixes containing quite a few constants and readonly values.
The class is below, but a few interesting facts first:
- Most values are const, but a few are readonly static variables because they cannot calculated at compile time (the C# compiler by design does very limited calculations at compile time; it is complex enough as it already is).
As Jon Skeet explains, there are some other differences between const and readonly static, which is why I favour const.
- Though all consts are positive, I could have used UInt32 and UInt64, but the .NET framework favours signed Int32 and Int64 types for parameters, so to avoid casting, I used the signed ones.
- There is no Int128 or UInt128, but there is System.Numerics.BigInteger which I use for values too large for 64-bit integers.
Note that BigInteger is relatively new, so this code will only work in C# 4 or higher, and requires .NET 4 or higher.
This is also the place where I use the public readonly static fields, as I need to call the BigInteger constructor to initialize it.
- I used the Decimal type, as the mantissa holds up to 28 digits of accuracy.
I used the Wikipedia pages Binary Prefix and Metric Prefix (I could also have used File Size) for the unit names and abbreviations.
Note that BitsPerByte is a const I needed too, and I will probably add constants for 512 and 4096, as you see those often in computing as well.
The below sample code is also available as a changeset on BeSharp.CodePlex.com. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in .NET, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, C#, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Jon Skeet, Software Development | Tagged: endregion, region | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/08/06
I was called by a client that didn’t want to do maintenance on an old Delphi application, but wanted to get dir of an I/O Error 131:
I/O Error 131: ERROR_NEGATIVE_SEEK
MessageText: An attempt was made to move the file pointer before the beginning of the file.
Tough luck: psychic powers told me someone is using an unsigned 32-bit integer to access a file using traditional style Assign/Reset/Seek/Read/Close patterns that Delphi kept as intrinsic routines for Turbo Pascal backward compatibility, and that file has grown over 2 gigabyte in size.
I quickly found an import file had grown over the 2 gigabyte, so this was indeed the case.
The original developers didn’t do the file access using the 64-bit Seek/Position of the TStream descendant TFileStream.
Too bad, as now someone has to dig through the mothballs to find the sources (if they survived 3 different version control system switches), create a working development environment, and fix the bug.
Another instance where technical debt in IT raises its ugly head and the compound interest is really expensive.
–jeroen
via: erikmartin.com – IO Errors in Delphi.
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi 5, Development, Event, Software Development, Technical Debt | 14 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/14
I had some notes on Delphi WSDL and SOAP peculiarities somewhere, but I misplaced them.
Luckily, I found some links that explain most of my notes well:
–jeroen
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Development, Event, SOAP/WebServices, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/03/27
As I wrote before, I’m with the [WayBack] Delphi with haters camp, and this is why:
Using the [WayBack] with statement in Delphi makes your code less future proof.
Originally, the with statement in Pascal was argumented in part of allowing compiler optimisations:
PASCAL User Manual and Report – Kathleen Jensen, Niklaus Wirth – Google Books
The with clause effectively opens the scope containing field identifiers of the specified record variable, so that the field identifiers may occur as variable identifiers. (Thereby providing an opportunity for the compiler to optimize the qualified statement.)
Screenshots of this 1975 book are below the fold.
The Delphi (actually even before that Turbo Pascal compiler) has no measurable difference between with and non-with code.
The debugger however, still does not support with, and there are other drawbacks of which one is below.
The below code example is just one of many. I show it because I recently bumped into doing some long overdue code porting to Delphi XE3.
Since I’ve been bitten by using with a couple of times before, it didn’t take me long to find the cause.
Example code where FIConData is of type NOTIFYICONDATAW that used to compile fine:
with FIconData do
begin
cbSize := SizeOf(FIconData);
Wnd := Self.Handle;
uID := $DEDB;
uFlags := NIF_MESSAGE or NIF_ICON or NIF_TIP;
hIcon := Application.Icon.Handle;
uCallbackMessage := WM_CAS400NTIcon;
StrCopy(szTip, PChar(Caption));
end;
Well, as of Compiler Version 20, it doesn’t compile any more. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Borland Pascal, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi 1, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 3, Delphi 4, Delphi 5, Delphi 6, Delphi 7, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Development, Event, Pascal, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, With statement | 32 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/03/15
First a warning: when you have found the process holding open a file, and you want to forcibly close the handle, read this post why you should not: Windows Confidential: Forcing Handles Closed.
In fact:
if you forcibly need to close a handle to salvage something, you should reboot shortly afterwards.
Back to the question at hand:
One thing that annoys me no end about Windows is the old “sharing violation” error. Often you can’t identify what’s holding it open. Usually it’s just an editor or explorer just pointing to a relevant directory but sometimes I’ve had to resort to rebooting my machine.
Any suggestions on how to find the culprit?
All of the below solutions require you to run with Administrative privileges.
On current Windows versions, if you run them without UAC elevation, they will miss a lot of processes. And still: under some secured environments you won’t see all processes anyway.
My preferred answer is not on the list:
Quit the application that holds the handle
All the tools that show you the handles will indicate which process holds the handle.
Often, you can just quit that process, do your job on the affected file, then relaunch that process.
When the process is Explorer, there is a neat little trick that works for Windows Vista and up:
For explorer, btw, hold ctrl-shift and right-click a blank area of the start menu, and you’ll get “Exit Explorer” – ps, not quite Jeff’s answer.. – Mark Sowul
Another answer I like is to use Handle, as it is both a command-line tool, and allows for wildcard searching: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Event, Power User, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/03/14
Variant Records are a feature that has been in the Pascal language since Standard Pascal.
A cool page for historic perspective is R3R: Pascal Features in Popular Compilers, hopefully someone will update it to more modern versions of the mentioned compilers.
There is not much official documentation on the Delphi side on this, so below some parts of a case I used for a project that started in 1997 and is still in use to day. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in APPC, AS/400 / iSeries / System i, ASCII, COBOL, Communications Development, Conference Topics, Conferences, CPI-C, Delphi, Delphi 1, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 3, Delphi 4, Delphi 5, Delphi 6, Delphi 7, Delphi 8, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Development, Encoding, Event, HIS Host Integration Services, Internet protocol suite, MQ Message Queueing/Queuing, SNA, Software Development, TCP, Unicode, UTF-8, WebSphere MQ | 9 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/05
Lots of people think CSV is easy: it’s just a bunch of values separated with commas. But in practice it is not. Various reasons can make CSV very hard, especially since “CSV” is not a single, well-defined format. As always importing is always harder than exporting. A few reasons that make it hard:
A few links that helped me a lot getting input and output of CSV right in C#:
Thanks to Jabulaza:
–jeroen
via: Comma-separated values – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, CSV, Development, EBCDIC, Encoding, Event, Software Development | 4 Comments »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 