DelphiDabbler's Blog

While reviewing my old programs, I've found one that I've not archived but actually updated! It's only a minor update - the program now spits out a friendlier message when no files names are provided. Oh, and the dox were updated and markdownified. Get new release v2.1.0 View the source See the change log

I've been reviewing my too-big-to-handle collection of repositories on GitHub. Something had to give and I've picked two for culling just now. More to follow probably. Photo: Chris McKenna  ( Thryduulf )  CC BY-SA 4.0  license. One is the Clipboard Format Spy - a clipboard view that uses some pretty old API calls. It's not had a release since 2014, so I reckon it's time to call it a day. The other is Version Information Spy - a version information viewer / extractor program and explorer extension. I had a thing about version information resources back in the noughties and wrote quite a bit of code. Last month the program celebrated 10 years since its last release, so its pretty moribund - time to say goodbye. There's still some other version info stuff that I may or may not keep.

Just been reading one of Marco Cantu's blog posts and am inordinately excited to find the VCL tree view component now supports multi-state check boxes in Delphi 11 Alexandria. I've been waiting a while for this feature. Check out Marco's blog for details. Image from Marco's blog I know, if this makes me excited, I probably need to get a life!

Five years to the day from the release of PasHi v2.0.0 I've just released v2.1.0. And, no, I didn't plan it that way. More like I forgot about the program for half a decade until I needed it again! PasHi is a command line Pascal syntax highlighter and it's accompanied by a separate GUI front end program. The mode I use it in most of the time is to highlight code placed on the clipboard and write the result back to the clipboard. I mainly write HTML code fragments that can be pasted into an HTML4, 5 or XHTML documents. Occasionally I use it to write complete HTML files. The project is on GitHub as delphidabbler/pashi and the program installer for the latest release is also on GitHub as Release 2.1.0 . More info from my website .

I'm sure that I'm not the only one who gets irritated when opening a terminal window from the Windows start menu that the first thing I have to do is cd out of my user directory into wherever I want to be. On my old Win 7 machine I had an Explorer extension that let me open a command line in the selected directory. I don't have that on my current Win 10 machine. Neither do I want to do some registry editing nonsense to enable it. So imagine the joy when I discovered this hack yesterday: In Windows Explorer select the folder where you want to open a command line terminal window. Select the folder in the left hand pane. Type cmd in the address bar. Press enter, and voila! Wow ... wish I'd known that a few years ago. Now, if I'm the only one in the world who doesn't know this already apologies for wasting your time! And yes, I'm still using cmd.exe , and no, I don't use PowerShell. And yes, I'm an old fart resisting change. But I&

When I published v5.6.1 of the System Information Unit a couple of days back, I failed to catch another strange error in v5.6.0. As a result I've pushed out another bug fix today: v5.6.2. What error? Well it's a weird one - somehow I introduced a different version of the dash character into the some of the comments in PJSysInfo.pas - I think I copied and pasted the comments from a website. I fixed it by replacing the dashes with ASCII "-" characters. Who cares? Anyone using an old pre-Unicode version of Delphi should care, because it's entirely possible that the compiler will choke on such a character. I haven't tested it because I don't have such a beast. But better safe than sorry - this would be a pig of a bug to catch a few months down the line. I only noticed it because SourceTree's diff viewer couldn't display the characters. Well that's an hour I won't get back! Get the update from SourceForge .

Yesterday (2021-09-12) I released a couple of updates to the System Information Unit - v5.6.0 and v5.6.1. v5.6.0 adds support for detecting new Windows versions announced since the previous release last October 31st. Specifically: Windows 10 Version 21H1 Windows 10 Version 21H2 (due late 2021) DEV, Insider preview and beta releases of Windows 11 Windows 2018 Server Versions 2004 and 20H2 Windows 2022 Server Version 21H2 A new method was added to get an OSs revision number from the registry. This is TPJOSInfo.RevisionNumber . There were a few other minor changes. Take a look at the change log for more information. v5.6.1 followed a few hours later and simply marked a few more class methods as inline . This release also added details of v5.6.0 to the change log that got missed in the previous release and tweaked some other docs. v5.6.1 can be downloaded from SourceForge .

I've just released a new version of CodeSnip  that adds support for detecting and automatically compiling snippets using the new Delphi 11 Alexandria compiler. For more info see my post on the CodeSnip blog .

Before we start, please note that I'm discussing, by special permission, a pre-release product that is subject to change. (Image used by permission) So here's a brief list of what we can (hopefully) expect in Delphi/C++ Builder/RAD Studio 11: High DPI support in the IDE. Design time previews of VCL styles. An improved rich edit control in the VCL - I'm looking forward to that one! Native ARM compilation for Delphi on Macs. An Edge Chromium powered web browser control for FMX. If you want to know more then you can register for a sneak preview event  on 9th September.