Delphi
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 ACTIVELY work to bring new Delphi programmers. 2. Solve the problems with the IDE stability 3. Has […]
A bunch of surveys for Delphi users Read More »
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
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 ca refully, 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
Again on FreeAndNil – A meaningless debate? Read More »
A Journey by Bicycle Setting off in early June from Denmark on two wheels, I pedaled over 600 km to arrive at the H2O Esports Centre near Amsterdam, ready for two intense days of Delphi deep-dives.The northern weather delivered all the wind and rain promised 🙂 After a tire explosion and other small technical difficulties
Amsterdam Delphi Summit 2025 (A call to arms for bringing in “fresh blood”) 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
(Issues with) Dialog boxes under cross-platform Read More »
Generate your key here https://aistudio.google.com/app/apikey and 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,
Connecting Delphi 12 to Gemini AI 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
New in Delphi Athene 12.1, 12.2, 12.3 Read More »
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
New in Delphi Athene (12.0) Read More »
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
New in Delphi Sydney (10.4) Read More »
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 in Delphi Rio (10.3) Read More »
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
New in Delphi Seattle (10.0) Read More »
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 »
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
My odyssey in the world of bioinformatics, with Delphi 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 »
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 “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 »
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 »
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 »
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
KSDev released this year CrossVCL – a framework that allows you to build multi-platform applications. What is the difference between Firemonkey and CrossVCL? If you want to make your current app multi platform, you need to port it to Firemonkey. With CrossVCL you don’t need anything!!! They really upgraded Delphi/C++ programming to a brand new
KSDev CrossVCL – A framework that allows you to build multi-platform applications. Read More »
List of IDE features that are cool Search backwards – Ctrl+F to do a search in your code. F3 to go to the next position Shift+F3 to go to previous position. Move/Relocate/Rename project’s files directly from Project Manager Navigate to recently modified code – Ctrl+Shift+F7 and Ctrl+Shift+F8 Search for usage – Right click a variable
Cool new features and functions in Delphi Read More »
I recently observed that Setup files created with WinRar have a high false positive detection rate from antiviruses. Here are the conclusions of some test I made, in order to reduce the false positive rate: RAR version SFX module Detection ratio WinRar 3.11 32bit 1/66 WinRar 4.2 32bit? 3/66 WinRar 5.50 32bit 6/67 WinRar 5.50
False antivirus reports on installers created with WinRAR Read More »
I stepped last week in a multiple-bug situation with EurekaLog for Delphi. I again wasted MORE than a day with this buggy “exception tracer tool”. My DRP file is like this: PROGRAM MyProgram; uses {$ifdef win32}fastmm4,{$endif} EurekaLog_units_come_here This worked fine until I compiled the program to 64 bits. On 64 bit, EurekaLog refused to work.
Yet another EurekaLog bug. How many until now? Read More »
