I am still amazed to see how many (even seasoned) Delphi programmer don’t understand exceptions. This is a reply to the Silver Coder’s video. He states that exceptions are not the best idea and the reason mentioned in the (way too) short video is that try/except makes the code slow and difficult to read. I […]
Too many programmers don’t understand exceptions. Do you? Read More »
Note: This article is tightly connected to the “Never create a new Delphi project” article. These are my settings for each new project I start and the explanation why they are set like this. Also, I will try to convince you to use Assertions. They are a gemstone ignored by (way too) many programmers. Overflow
How to correctly set the compiler options Read More »
Note: This article is tightly connected to the “How to correctly set the compiler options” article. Somebody asked how to set the default project options for a new Delphi project. I stopped years ago wasting time with this. Instead I have a folder where I store a “template” project. You can find this Delphi template
Never create a new Delphi project Read More »
I needed to open PDF files in Delphi. There seems to be a lot of libraries out there, but when my restrictions (read PDF, native Delphi code, cross-platform, acceptable price) started to kick in I realized that there are not so many options. I created therefore this Delphi PDF library comparison table to help me
PDF libraries for Delphi – Roundup Read More »
This is an excerpt from my “Delphi in all its glory – Libraries” $(Auto) is a new environment variable, introduced in Delphi 10.4. Embarcadero didn’t make a big show around it so it went unnoticed by most programmers. But don’t ignore it! It is extremely useful for packages, where it can be used as an
$(Auto) – One package to rule them all Read More »
I have encountered quite a few computers where you could hear the CPU/GPU “accelerating” in the sound card. I never owned such a cheap board. Lucky me. Mainboard for enthusiasts are much better than those in the laptops and “large-scale” PC sales.The round up (https://www.techspot.com/review/2907-amd-x870-motherboards/) shows impressive values for all modern enthusiast mother boards.Again, today
“Cheap companies making cheap mainboards” or “Why I hate laptops” Read More »
12 years ago I built a PC that worked for… 12 years. The mainboard died recently so I have to build a new one. So, I started to document myself. CPU I am interested in single-core high-frequency CPU because I will use the PC mostly to compile Delphi code. I have found some charts that
Godzilla II – Building a new PC Read More »
I left Romania, country where I was born, about 20 years ago. I decided to take a look on how it evolved since I left and I am happy to see that things are progressing quite well. Statistics Romania is very less populated, with a population density way under the EU average. The birth
Today I ran a test to see which is the best way to compress Delphi projects for backup/archive purposes. The contestants are Zip, WinRAR (v7.01) and 7Zip (v24.08). I expected WinRar to be the winner in all cases (as usual) but for plain text files (PAS), the results were surprising. 7Zip won! TEXT COMPRESSION Original
Best compressor for archiving Delphi code Read More »
I am happy yo announce that all books in the “Delphi in all its glory” series will be available in electronic format. They will be delivered not a PDF but under my own reader (exe file) called Orinoco eReader. Advantages You can read the book from you computer. Smaller price Fair price – With the
Get “Delphi in all its glory” as eBook Read More »
My Experience with Cursor: The Promise and the Reality This week, I had the opportunity (or perhaps the misfortune?) to try out Cursor, a new tool that promises to enhance productivity for programmers. As someone who primarily works in Delphi, I was curious to see how it would stack up. Cursor is an AI-powered coding
AI plugins for Delphi (a sad story) Read More »
The Delphi in all its glory book shows that at design time the IDE is the host of all visual components on our forms. If a single control misbehaves at design time it might take down the whole IDE. In most cases this happens while we drag and drop such components from Components Palette on
How to debug your VCL components Read More »
“Delphi in all its glory – Delphi for more than mere programmers” (ISBN:9798387412141) was released on time (March 2023) as promised. This is the first book in the series. You can find the printed book on your local Amazon (Amazon.com, Amazon.de, etc) or in electronic format. The source code for the example used in the
News: The “Delphi in all its glory [Part 1]” book Read More »
SetFocus is broken in Delphi. Has been since v1 and there are no signs that it will be fixed soon. What does it mean, broken? Do I really have to explain it? We all know. Try to set focus on a visual control that is disabled or is invisible or simply is not focusable, and
SetFocus is broken in Delphi Read More »
Here is a summary (extracted from Wikipedia) of the most popular software open source license. License Latest ver Linking Distribution Modification Patent grant Private use Sublicensing TM grant Apache License 2.0 Permissive Permissive Permissive Yes Yes Permissive No BSD License 3.0 Permissive Permissive Permissive[ Manually Yes Permissive Manually Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Public Domain Public
Open source software licenses are complicated Read More »
I wanted to keep track of my Delphi upgrades over the years. Hope people will learn from this. I tried also to keep track of the Delphi jobs in Germany over the years. They seem to be decreasing. Trying to upgrade to Delphi 2010 Unless support for Unicode is badly needed, staying with Delphi 7
Upgrading to Delphi, over the years Read More »
Two weeks ago, a buggy project landed in my hands, to repair. The bug report was really unclear – it was just stated a piece of code that was supposed to upload some Json files to the Azure cloud was not working on some PCs. The code was something like this – well actually was
When company does not want to spend money for training… they spend more money for fixing Read More »
Back in the early 90’s people invented a program called rich text editor. In it you could format text to be bold, italic. Paragraphs were also available. Then years went by, the rich editors got better and better until they culminated with really powerful and eye candy editors like MS Word. In parallel Linux came
Formatting tricks for StackOverflow and GitHib – Reinventing the text editor Read More »
I worked in a large project that had lots of frames and lots of dynamically created controls. When the software was running was difficult to figure out which control is which and were is created. So, I wrote this tiny piece of code that tells you which control is under the mouse. I was showing
Mouse Digger – Show control under cursor Read More »
We all created at one point some small utility to do some dirty job for us. It started as a 100 liner then became bigger and bigger. And then we decided to publish it. Let the whole world enjoy it. And this is when disaster hit: the users started to ask more and more features
One function to rule them all – Saving the whole GUI one single procedure call Read More »
Some of my programs need to run as single instance. This means that if an instance of my program is already running and the user is trying to start another instance, the second instance should not run. However, before closing the second instance, I want to pass the command line parameters from that second instance
