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 […]
Delphi Firemonkey – ld.exe cannot find shlwapi.dll: No such file or directory Read More »
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,
Obtaining cheap EV/OV certificates & singing your application Read More »
This is a chapter from “Delphi in all its glory” book. 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
Cross-platform development with Firemonkey – Tool-chain setup Read More »
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
The four rules of packages Read More »
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
TRichEdit removes images when TRichEdit.ReadOnly = True Read More »
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.
Say no to crappy images in your Delphi programs. Finding the best resizing algorithm. Read More »
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
Solution to Battle.Net installer stuck to 45% Read More »
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
Environment variables and macros in Delphi Read More »
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 in my books. 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
Breakpoints – Issues during debugging Read More »
Breakpoints A breakpoint tells the debugger to pause the program’s execution at the location (line of code) where the breakpoint is. We can set source breakpoints in the Code Editor before we run the program, but also while the program is already running. The places where we can place breakpoints are marked by a blue
Delphi breakpoints Read More »
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.
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
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
Never create a new Delphi project – Use templates instead! 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 »
Note: This page is an excerpt from my “Delphi in all its glory – Libraries” book. $(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
$(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
Hardware – 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 »
This is a tour guide if you want to travel to Romania – a cheap place where you can find exquisite food (I mean it!). TOC Statistics about RomaniaOverview of the Romanian Language Romanian Alphabet & Pronunciation Vowels Consonants Useful words English-like wordsTraveling to Romania Safety Be aware of
Traveling to Romania – A guide Read More »
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
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 »
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 on bug 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
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 so the whole world can enjoy it. And this is when disaster hits: the users start to ask more and more
One function to rule them all – Saving the whole GUI one single procedure call Read More »
01.2023 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
