DelphiDabbler's Blog

By the skin of my teeth I've kept the promise I made in my earlier post to release an alpha, or preview, version of CodeSnip v4 by the end of 2011 - with 20 mins to spare! Phew. The main new feature of the program is that snippets etc. can now be opened in multiple tabs, allowing more than one to be viewed at the same time. There are several other UI changes and a lot of behind that scenes re-coding. You can see a full list in the update log . The preview is only available on SourceForge - in the CodeSnip project's Release-4.0.0-alpha.1 directory. If you decide to try the preview, be careful, and read the release's read-me file before installing. Enjoy.

Back in December 2010 I announced I'd started work on CodeSnip v4 and expected to release a new beta in a "few months". Now, nearly eleven months later I've made some noticable progress and am considering an alpha release! I'm hoping to get this out by the year end. One of first new features I've decided on is to add multiple tab browsing of the database. This means that more than one snippet can be viewed in tabs in the main display. One consequence of this change is that test compilation of Delphi Snippets have been demoted from the main display to a dialog box. The source code for the new version is in the v4-dev branch of the CodeSnip Subversion repo. Use at your own risk. Update: The v4 development code has now been integrated into the trunk and the v4-dev branch has been removed. There's still an opportunity to suggest new features using the Feature Tracker on SourceForge.

I've just updated CodeSnip to v3.9.0 to allow code snippets to be test compiled by Delphi XE2 (32 bit only). But I've had to make some educated guesses in adding that support because I don't yet have XE2. I'm hoping you can help by either confirming or correcting the following assumptions:  The registry key \Software\Embarcadero\BDS\9.0 exists in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE hive. The registry key contains a string value named RootDir that has a string value that provides Delphi XE2's installation path. The 32 bit compiler is located in the Bin sub-directory of the installation path and is named DCC32.exe . The new version of CodeSnip depends on these assumptions being true! Further, I'd like to add support for the 64 bit compiler. To do this I need to know what the file name is (is it DCC64.exe ?) and where it's located. If you can help please do so via comments or by contacting me via my website contact page .

A user of my CodeSnip program has reported a strange bug where, after using the Snippets Editor to add a new snippet, the editor dialog box refuses to close, hanging the program. Apparently this happens only sometimes, and affects v3.8.9 and some earlier versions. I can't reproduce the problem and was wandering if anyone else has experienced this bug. If so it would be very helpful if you could leave a comment describing what happened and what you were doing when the bug arose. Thanks

I recently came across an interesting little problem when using Delphi to call JavaScript in an HTML document loaded into a TWebBrowser control. The code used the execScript method of the IHTMLWindow interface, which requires that a string containing the JavaScript function call is passed as one of its parameters. So you have to assemble a string containing the function call and its parameters, something like this: var JSFn : string ; StrParam : string ; IntParam : Integer ; FloatParam : Double ; begin StrParam := 'Say \"Hello\"' ; // double quotes must be escaped IntParam := 42 ; FloatParam := 1234.56789 ; JSFn := Format ( 'Foo(%d, "%s", %.8f);' , [ IntParam , StrParam , FloatParam ] ) ; ExecJS ( JSFn ) ; end ; I'll show ExecJS later. It's just a wrapper that ultimately calls IHTMLWindow.execScript with the required JavaScript. The interesting bit is what happens to the floating...

The site on the old server has now been taken down, so if you are getting any "can't find server" errors when accessing www.delphidabbler.com its time to flush your DNS cache . The migration seems to have gone well and I've cleared up what glitches I have found. If you've found an error you can burst my bubble by emailing me about the problem on teet&#104ing [at] delphidabbler [d&#111t] com So, with a bit of luck, it's back to Delphi coding soon!

Forgot to mention before, but there's now a wiki at wiki.delphidabbler.com . It's currently being used for a series of FAQs about some of my Delphi Library components and units. The hope is that others may add to it. You can also leave new questions there. At present there are FAQs for: About Box Component Console Application Runner Classes Drop Files Components Message Dialog Components I may also use the wiki for some program documentation at some point.

As of today DelphiDabbler.com has moved to a new web host. The nameservers have been updated and the relocated site should start to appear over the next couple of days. Why the move? . Down to money really. This is a non commercial site with falling advertising revenue (albeit with increasing traffic!) and my old web host hiked the price while admittedly providing a host of new features. Consequently I've had a shop around and shaved nearly £90 off the price while retaining all the features I need. The site does seem a little less responsive than it was, but for me that's a price worth paying (or not paying) in the current financial climate. There are no changes to the site itself - both www.delphidabbler.com and wiki.delphidabbler.com still work as before. There may be a few teething problems because I've had to make some behind the scenes changes to suit the new host setup. If you find any problems please let me know by emailing teet&#104ing [...