Serialization is a critical technique in programming, enabling objects to be saved to disk or transmitted over a network. While there’s no universal, automatic way to serialize complex objects in Delphi (due to challenges like private fields), manual serialization is straightforward—and binary serialization, in particular, stands out as the fastest and most efficient method. In […]

After a conversation about the low popularity of the Delphi language—further worsened by the lack of libraries for Delphi—I decided to share my odyssey in the world of bioinformatics, using Delphi as my primary development tool. My toy tool that turned into a commercial product Back in 2007, I wrote a small tool for a

Even though there are a few tools for porting a project from the VCL (Visual Component Library) to FMX (FireMonkey) the process is not easy especially because not all VCL components have direct FMX equivalents. Some components require substitution, and some functionality must be reimplemented. The problem deepens with 3rd party VCL components. Tools for

After installing FMX and using it for a while I started getting a weird “ld.exe cannot find shlwapi.dll” message. There was nothing like this to be found on the internet! I posted a question of StackOverflow but people started to point in (as later turned out to be) totally wrong directions. The complete error msg

You can publish your application on your website. However, the Microsoft Smart Screen will not like it at all if the application is not signed. This is how your application looks like when it is singed and un-signed: Signing your application could cost as much as $800 per year, but if you do some research,

This is a chapter from “Delphi in all its glory” series. Preparing for cross-platform An SDK is required for the following platforms: Multi-device applications for the iOS Device – 64-bit platform. Multi-device applications for the Android platform. Multi-device applications for the Linux platform. If you haven’t chouse to install them during Delphi setup, you need

Rule #1: Always separate your business-logic code from the GUI code. Without this rule, all your code will be a hot mess, where libraries cannot exist. Rule #2: There should be no floating units. A unit should always belong to a project (Dpr or Dpk). Without this, you will fail to properly generate some DCU

When trying to load an RTF file using RichEdit.Lines.LoadFromFile(FileName) and RichEdit.ReadOnly = True the RichEdit removes all images from the RTF file showing an empty placeholder. Solution: The solution is to call these methods in this specific order with these specific parameters: Note that TRichEdit has full support for images from Delphi 11. If you

So, because I built a program that has to resize/scale images up and down, I built this tool to test 13 resizing algorithms for Delphi. Tested algorithms Tests: Two of the above tests include 3rd party algorithms.If you don’t have access to their source code, you will have to switch off the {$3RDPARTY} switch. Test

After so many years, there still is no solution to this problem online. So, I had to try to fix it on my own. Two things worked for me: 1. Manually delete all stuff related to BattleNet from my computer (registry and disk) then try to reinstall: Full of wisdom, Blizzard spreads its crap all

Environment variables are strings defined by the IDE. Each environment variable serves a specific purpose. Some of them are fixed, others are changed dynamically depending on what/how you are compiling your project. For example, they provide dynamic paths that influence where files are stored, define default locations for binaries, define how projects are built, and

For any debugging issue, make sure that the program is compiled under the “Debug” configuration, and that the “Debug” configuration is properly set, as explained in the “Debugger” chapter above. Don’t forget to build (instead of compile) after changing any project settings! Also, don’t put yourself in a dreadful situation by using 3rd party libraries

I am still amazed to see how many (even seasoned) Delphi programmer don’t understand exceptions. This post starts from a nice video posted by the Silver Coder. He states that exceptions are not the best idea and the reason mentioned in the short video is that try/except makes the code slow and difficult to read.

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

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

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

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

“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