DelphiDabbler's Blog

Well, it's been a long haul to get this little diff and patch suite from v0.2.x to v1.0. 22 years and 2 days ago I released my first attempt at translating Stefan Reuther's bdiff / bpatch utilities from C to Pascal. Stefan's original code was first published in 1999. This was v0.2.1(pas). Then, 1 day short of 2½ years ago the first v1.0 beta was released. 1 year, 1 month and 1 week ago the release candidate was made available. In the related blog post I said I was almost there, "almost there" meaning "about a year away", obviously. And today, v1.0.0 has finally been let out into the wild. Slow and steady does it! What's the difference between the release candidate and the final release? Not much. There are no new features, just a bit of refactoring, extra error checking and a new test. I've moved over to compiling with Delphi 13 & tweaked the docs. If you're not sure what these utilities do, then read the man pages:  BDiff  /  BPatc...

Despite continually threatening to retire the  System Information Unit , here's an update The update was prompted by GitHub user weirdo12 who submitted a pull request that added $EXTERNALSYM compiler directives to make the code usable with C++ Builder. His code is included in this release. While adding the above code I decided I'd better update TPJOSInfo with details of all the changes to Windows 10 and 11 since the end of last year. The result of a very boring day poring over this year's Windows builds is that the class now detects Windows 11 version 25H2 and has provisional support for the previews of the forthcoming version 26H1 released so far. 🠊  Get the new version (5.33.0) from the  GitHub release page . The VCL & FMX versions of the demo program's have been updated to display info about Windows 11 25H2 and 26H1. So will this be the last release? I doubt it because I'm planning on doing a year end update and maybe a revision once Windows 11 26H1 is rel...

Did I say that the previous post was the last concerning changes in response to the release of Delphi 13? Well I lied! I remembered that my  Code Snippets Collection  didn't have any information about whether snippets compiled with Delphi 13, so I've been through all 700+ of them and checked. All the results are now in the database. The collection specification docs needed to be updated as a result of adding this support, so that's been done too. And the version number got a minor version bump because of the change. In addition to that I discovered some other changes I'd made to the develop branch back in April, so these were rolled into this release too. There's a couple of new snippets, along with a whole bunch of new unit tests. For full details see the change log for v2.3.0 . ✅ Download release v2.3.0 from GitHub . To install it into CodeSnip , select the  Database | Install or Update DelphiDabbler Snippets Database  menu option and the resulting wizard guide...

And finally ... after a few updates to reflect the release of Delphi 13 Florence , last but not least we have an update to CodeSnip . This program can test compile snippets with any Delphi compiler installed on the host computer, along with Free Pascal. But every time there's a new Delphi release CodeSnip has to be modified to be able to use it. I wish there was a config file to update, but it's not that simple with this ancient code base! So, CodeSnip 4.27.0 knows about the existence of Delphi 13, can use it for test compilation, can record the results of such compilations in its databases and can emit code that selectively turns warnings on and off for the compiler. That's the only new feature of this release. The docs and help file have been suitably updated. ➣  Download the v4.27.0 release from GitHub . BTW the first time you run this new version after installing Delphi 13, CodeSnip will notice and will offer to configure itself to use the new compiler, unless you'v...

The second thing I did after the release of Delphi 13,  after updating my website , was to enable the unit-scope look-up program, DUSE , to create a new mapping of all the units used by Delphi 13 to their unit scopes. This is easy to do: Having clicked  OK  then Save And Close  DUSE will read the names of all library units installed with Delphi 13. A new "mapping" named Delphi 13 Florence is created and you can select it whenever you're using Delphi 13: You can switch to any other mappings you may have created at any time: you can see the ones I've made in the above image. ➣ Download DUSE v0.3.2 from GitHub For help using DUSE, see the mini-help section of the program's read-me file. By the way, the code in DUSE that finds a given Delphi installation is very similar to that discussed in my article  How to programatically detect installed versions of Delphi . And finally, I used Delphi 13 to compile this new version of DUSE.

Now that Delphi 13 Florence is out, I've updated delphidabbler.com to bring relevant pages up to date. The changes are: The Delphi Version Numbers page has been updated with relevant information about Delphi 13. The most notable change is that the product version has now been brought into line with the compiler version, internal version and defined symbol. This means the product version has jumped from Delphi 12's version 29 to 37. The Delphi Version Features page has had numerous additions relating to features introduced in Delphi 13. If you know of any more please tell me by raising a new issue on GitHub (no C++ stuff though!). Article #27 (How to programatically detect installed versions of Delphi)  has been updated to include Delphi 13 in the list Delphi versions than can be detected. The notable change is that, due to the change in version numbering noted above, the registry key for Delphi 13 has changed similarly. For e.g. Delphi 12's key is  \Software\Embarcader...