Posts

Almost there - BDiff v1.0.0-rc.1 released

Image
It's only taken 21 years, but we're approaching the release of v1.0 of the BDiff/BPatch utilities . I don't want to rush it though (😉) so I've just put out a release candidate. There are various tweaks since beta 2, but the headline is that the programs are now available in 64 bit versions in addition to 32 bit. I'd been putting this off because I expected trouble, but everything happily re-compiled with the Delphi 64 bit Windows compiler and just worked. No changes required. Phew. If you want to read about the other tweaks then take a look at the change log . Not sure what these utilities do, then read the man pages: BDiff / BPatch . ✅ You can get RC1 from the GitHub release page .

CodeSnip v4.24.0 released

Image
CodeSnip  v4.24.0 has just been released. There's no main feature in this release. It's a bit of a mish-mash of numerous minor bug fixes and tweaks that have been implemented since the previous release. I'm not going into detail about the numerous small changes here: check out the  change log  if you're interested. Do you need this release? Well, its not going to knock your socks off, but there are a couple of bug fixes, so installing it wouldn't do any harm. ✅ Get v4.24.0 from its  GitHub releases page .

v2.2.0 of the DelphiDabbler Code Snippets Collection released

Release v2.2.0 of this collection of Pascal code snippets has just been uploaded to GitHub. The collection can be viewed using CodeSnip . For details see the more detailed CodeSnip blog post .

System Information Unit v5.30.0 release (but why?)

Image
In my native Yorkshire (in England) we have a saying that "there's nowt so funny as folk" ( trans: "there's nothing so peculiar as people" ). Well, in my post on 1st October, when v5.29.0 was released, I made it very clear that I was getting utterly sick of keeping the OS detection code up to date and was going to do just one final release at the year end. And then, a matter of days later, v5.30.0 dropped, and it's not the last release. So what's going on? Nowt so funny as folk. I was looking over the code and poking round the registry and thought there were a few more methods that really could be added to the OS detection code. Since I'm a bit under the weather at the moment and can't be bothered doing anything else, I entertained myself by adding those missing methods. They are all class methods of TPJOSInfo  (follow the links for documentation): BuildBranch DigitalProductID And then I started wondering if there was a way, that didn't

System Information Unit v5.29.0 released

Image
I can't believe we're slipping into autumn already. October 1st has been made all the more gloomy by poking around documentation trying to make sense of Windows builds that have been released in the last 3 months. It's taken hours! Anyhow, here's the autumn update to the  System Information Unit , v5.29.0. This update recognises the Windows 10 & 11 builds released from 1st July to 30 September 2024, which includes (today actually) the release of Windows 11 24H2. Grab this release from the project's GitHub  releases page , where you can also read the change log. At the spring update I mentioned that it's getting very tedious trying to match up the various Windows builds and revisions with the actual marketing names used for what is still labelled as Windows 10.0 if you only look at the actual version number reported by Windows! So, I think I'm going to do one more update to this unit at the year end and that will be it.

Version Information Editor v2.16.0

Image
I've just released v2.16.0 of my rather niche Version Information Editor . This program helps with writing the version info resource that should be in every program. Now I know that Delphi has been generating that information for usfor ages now, but the way it goes about doesn't work the way I want, so I wrote my own tool! Anyhow, this new version allows the value of an environment variable to be included in version information. You can also create new variables on the command line using the  -E:name=value  command line parameter. The variables can be referenced in the program using a new <%Env> macro. See the help file for details. Like all my recent releases I've simplified the process of building the program from within the Delphi IDE and added a new script to create release using MSBuild instead of Make. There are also a few bugs fixes and I've made a long overdue start on refactoring the very smelly and ancient code! 👉 Get v2.16.0 from GitHub  (all changes

Delphi 12.2 is now available

Image
The latest version of Delphi has been released today as part of RAD Studio 12.2. Hot from the release webinar, the new features in Delphi and the IDE that most appeal to me are: The Delphi compiler & tools are now available as 64 bit executables that can be used as an option when using MSBuild. These can be used for Windows 32 and 64 targets. This means mega size applications can be built as single application files. Happy, happy! In the Delphi RTL:   TParallelArray - faster parallel operations. TOrderedDictionary - I've been wanting this for a while. I had one written on XE, but it broke of Delphi 11! Smart CodeInsight: AI coding support using OpenAI , Gemini & Claude . These are all online, so you need to trust them and you may need to pay any service fees. There's also Ollama which is offline, free of change, and apparently sends no data through the net. These are all off by default. You can add other AI tools if you have the rights to use them. Focus mode: see on