CodeRage 2025 was an amazing event. I created a short summary of the CodeRage Day1 presentation for my future reference. Then I thought that it might be useful for others also so I will post it here. This is time consuming… if possible I will summarize the other days also. The text is generated with […]
Embarcadero Delphi CodeRage 2025 Summary [Day1] Multithreading, Concurrency, Parallelism Read More »
Note: This is an excerpt from my “Delphi in all its glory [Part 2]” book. Find the full chapter there. A memory manager is a very special piece of code that controls the allocation and deallocation of memory throughout the entire application. The memory management in Delphi is unique because ALL memory is
Android’s lifecycle model is a mess. The OS freely kills your process whenever it needs RAM, and you—the app developer—are expected to deal with the fallout. Android shifts its memory problems onto the app layer, leaving you to rebuild your internal state because the OS felt like freeing 200 MB. FireMonkey tries to give you
A Stack Overflow user wanted to know why clicking on the form’s close button while some FOR loop is running does nothing: procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject); var i: Integer; begin for i := 0 to 9999999 do begin Memo1.Lines.Add(‘hi’); Application.ProcessMessages; end; end; The issue comes from the lack of understanding of how the forms work. Here
The {$PUSHOPT} and {$POPOPT} directives introduced in Delphi 13 are used to save and restore the current set of compiler options and warning configurations. Useful when we want to include .inc files or code sections that might alter compiler settings, and we want to ensure that these changes do not affect the rest of your
I open-sourced my AI client. For the moment it only supports Google Gemini, but it can be easily extended to other LLMs (Claude, OpenAI, etc.) by subclassing TLLMObject. What it does This Delphi library lets your application talk to the Gemini API without you having to fight with HTTP, multipart upload sessions, JSON body assembly,
NameOf is a magic function introduced in Delphi 13. What it does is return the identifier name of a symbol (routine, variable, etc.) as a string, as resolved by the compiler. It can be used for: Consistent naming Its main advantage is that if we later rename the function, the compiler forces the change
About the new Delphi 13 “magic” routine NameOf (also UnitName) Read More »
When I upgrade to the next Delphi version, instead of re-configuring the IDE from scratch, I usually “port” the settings from the old version to the new version. For this: I extract some registry keys to text (reg) files In each file I (batch) replace the old version with the new version (for example “21.0”
How to easily port the IDE (registry) settings when you reinstall or upgrade Delphi Read More »
I needed (for a project I am working on) to obtain the default language for the operation system. Preferable it should be in “human” format like “English” instead of “En-US”. The AI lead me to strange paths. In the end it tuned out to be quite easy so I created these two function (now part
I’ve seen JavaScript developers complain that every few years they’re forced to switch frameworks. Angular, React, Vue, Svelte… each one promising stability, then slowly fading out while the next shiny thing takes over. It’s a cycle of rewrites, migration guides, and “deprecated” warnings. And it hit me: I’ve been really lucky with Delphi.While others wrestle
If you place the cursor on an identifier (variable/function name/etc), CnPack will show you where that identifier is used in your code. Look for example how easy it is to spot where the FBuffPos variable is used in the code below: Also, see how “dangerous” instructions (“Exit”) have been marked in blue! Note: On your
How to highlight identifier under cursor in (any) Delphi IDE Read More »
Here is the trick: Go to Preferences->Multi-instances->Default (mono-instance). Close notepad++ Go to “c:\Program Files\Notepad++” and create there an empty file called “asNotepad.xml” (of course, you will need Admin privileges for that). Result: When you double click a TXT file in Explorer, Notepad++ will open and show that new document in its own window/tab.
How to make NotePad++ open each document in its own tab? Read More »
I’ve seen this trend where AI lacks (compared with other languages) when you try to use it for Delphi (VCL). Probably not their fault. Probably because of lack of code on GitHub…. 😞 Initially, I thought it was only an impression, but later tests (for example, generating a full program with Replit in Delphi and
I was looking for a collapsible panel for many years. The most important feature I want from this control is to be able to collapse vertically. Here are the results of my research: FoldingPanel (VCL) I used FoldingPanel v1.3 http://www.torry.net/authorsmore.php?id=2386 for years. It comes with nice chevron bitmap too. Advantage: The component comes as a
A vertically collapsible panel for Delphi (round up) Read More »
Delphi is great for RAD. We all love Delphi, even when we are mad at it. In my opinion Delphi has 3 issues that Embarcadero has to fix in order to make Delphi more attractive. 1. It has NOT ACTIVELY worked to bring new Delphi programmers. 2. Solve the problems with the IDE stability 3.
I haven’t nailed down a favorite AI yet. Copilot’s at the bottom of my list—it churns out the worst Delphi code and gives answers so short they’re borderline useless. Grok’s been the frontrunner so far, based on my own tinkering. I had subscriptions to Google’s AI and to ChatGPT and Copilot. In some video presentations
Locating BPL dependency failure In one instance my package required another package, but its BPL was not present. The error I got was “Can’t load package xyz.bpl. %1 is not a valid Win32 application”. I used the Dependency scanner feature from ‘PE Explorer’ ( www.heaventools.de ) to detect this. There was supposed to be a
Can’t load package xyz.bpl. %1 is not a valid Win32 application – BPL dependency failure Read More »
Recently, I came across a forum where somebody described FreeAndNil as an “abomination” and I think that’s a bit over the top. Let’s unpack this topic carefully, with technical clarity and an eye for proportion. FreeAndNil(SomeObject) is just syntactic sugar for: if SomeObject <> nil then begin SomeObject.Free; SomeObject := nil; end; The actual implementation
I was undecided if I should attend to this conference or not because I didn’t have enough information about the previous one. So, here is my 2.5 cents. A Journey by Bicycle Setting off in early June from Denmark on two wheels, I pedaled a few hundred km for the Delphi summit. The northern weather
Amsterdam Delphi Summit 2025 (A call to arms for bringing in “fresh blood”) Read More »
Alt+T, E is all you need to press when the LSP stops working in Delphi. Delphi 12.3 introduced a new menu under Tools -> Reload LSP server. Alt+T, E is it keyboard accelerator. It will require under a second for LSP to restart. However, the menu will not be available to be reused for quite
Delphi LSP stopped working? Fix it with 2 key strokes. Read More »
In FMX, unlike the VCL, the Visible property affects both design time and runtime when set in the Object Inspector. That’s why setting Visible:= False in FMX hides components in the Form Designer, which is a big inconvenience. If you edit the form at design time often, you can keep Visible:= True in the designer
Under FMX, TComponent.Visible effects also the design time! Read More »
VCL had a nice and uniform message box system. Most important (and convenient), the messages were blocking. Because of the Android platform which does not support asynchronous messages, all this is gone. So I document here the behavior of few different ways in which we can display message boxes in FMX. None is perfect (not
Generate your key here https://aistudio.google.com/app/apikeyand enter it into the IDE. As URL enter: https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1 Parameters Top-P [official documentation] Top-P changes how the model selects tokens for output. Tokens are selected from the most (see top-K) to least probable until the sum of their probabilities equals the top-P value. For example, if tokens A, B, and
Connecting Delphi 12 to Gemini AI (Smart CodeInsight) Read More »
Delphi Athene – Release 1 (12.1) Support for split editor views in the IDE. Use multiple editors side by side, above and below each other, or a mix, all in the same window. Right-clicking a tab and choose Split or Move. Split will create another version of the selected tab, while move will close the
IDE Removed deprecated features: VCL Translation Support & Modeling Object Inspector – New string list editor Multiline string Editor Multiline string literals The Find in Files dialog now has a new Subdirectory exclude mask option, which excludes specific folders from being searched when using the Search in directories and Include subdirectories There are default exclusions
10.4 Styles are finally working! Better support for high DPI monitors. High DPI support in styles (skins) Per Control Styling Better cross platform support Custom managed records – records now support custom initialization, finalization, and copy operations. Developers can customize how records get created, copied, and destroyed, by writing the code to be executed at
Dark-light themes for IDE The IDE includes some of Andreas Hausladen’s “IDE Fix Pack” fixes and improvements (FINALLY!) High resolution timer caused by using Virtual Treeview. Findhinstance optimisations. Debugger using CREATE_DEFAULT_ERROR_MODE when creating the process. Tstringlist indexof and Name optimizations. High DPI Image List Support. Can fully support multi-resolution, pixel perfect images on all controls,
New custom VCL controls corresponding to some new Windows 10 UI controls, which can also be used on previous version of Windows. New VCL controls: TActivityindicator, TSearchbox, TRelativePanel, TToggleSwitch, TSplitview Modern looking SelectDirectory function Support for Windows 10 Notifications using the notificationcenter component Box2D physics engine. Object Pascal interfaces for the Box2D physics engine Support
GetLinesEnumerator – New enumerators for reading file content Returns the line-by-line enumerator without loading full file content into the memory. Memory Efficiency: TFile.GetLinesEnumerator reads the file line by line, which is memory-efficient for large files. Unlike TFile.ReadLines (which loads all lines into a list), this method streams the file incrementally. I test it with both
New in Delphi 12 – GetLinesEnumerator for reading text files line by line Read More »
Stack Overflow However, Stack Overflow has a very tough community. It can be quite challenging to post a question there AND get a decent answer and you could easily feel bullied there. The Stack Overflow lords know about it, and they tried to fix it with stricter rules about how people SHOULD behave, but they
