DelphiDabbler's Blog

I've treated myself to new Windows 11 laptop in this year's Black Friday sales. This going to be my main development machine. I decided to install a second copy of Windows in a virtual machine as a sandbox for beta testing and any other activities that i don't want scribbling all over my shiny new file system. Having settled upon Microsoft's official Windows 11 development VM I thought I'd use Hyper-V. That's when I hit a snag. My laptop is running Win 11 Home. And the Home edition doesn't officially support Hyper-V. Poking round net the revealed a hack to force Windows Home to install & use Hyper-V. Just in case anyone else is having the same problem, I thought I'd share a link to the page that explains how to get Hyper-V up and running. Here's the link: https://www.makeuseof.com/install-hyper-v-windows-11-home/ . While this hack worked for me, I'm issuing the usual disclaimer! If you do use this method, do remember to create a restore point...

 From the mid 1980s to early 90s I was proud to be a mature undergraduate student of the UK's remarkable  Open University †, majoring in pure Maths. I took a subsidiary computer science module as part of of the degree. Pascal was one of the languages that was taught ( Prolog  being another). At the time they taught Pascal using the P-system and  UCSD Pascal . UCSD Pascal in use - source Wikipedia, Public Domain UCSD Pascal Handbook - source  http://www.kdbarto.org/UCSD_Pascal.html So why does that make me feel my age? Well the Wikipedia  Pascal Programming  page discusses UCSD Pascal under the " Early Pascal Compilers " section! And the last release was in the mid eighties. Now I did pass that course (with distinction I might add!) and I'd love to show you some of the code I wrote, but sadly it's on  5.25" floppies ! Strangely enough, I don't have a suitable drive handy. Which brings me on to another reason this makes me feel all dinosaur-like. To...

I've been going through my repositories on GitHub trying to decide which ones have had their day and need archiving and which ones to keep. The Version Information Manipulation DLL was on its way to the project afterlife when I realised that one of my other projects could use its code. So it got a reprieve. Since the project was last updated in 2007 and was compiled with Delphi 7 it obviously needed a bit of work to make sure I didn't break anything by switching to a Unicode compiler. Any how, after recompiling with Delphi 11, tweaking some code that assumes SizeOf(Char) = 1, adding a missing method and testing thoroughly, v1.1 is finally here. So what does it do? If reads raw, binary version information data that's been extracted from an executable or resource file, let's you edit it, and writes out a binary in the correct format for bundling into a resource file. Given that the Windows API does the reading bit then why bother? Well, some compilers don't write th...

If you're from the UK and of a certain age then you're going to have encountered the BBC micro. That machine, like the Sinclair Spectrum, is responsible for a lot of Brits getting their first introduction to programming. Those a bit younger than me might have used Beebs at school. For me it was at an adult education computing course where I used them to learn BASIC and Pascal. But is good old Auntie Beeb also partly responsible for the existence of the mighty ARM processor architecture? What? Well... The BBC funded Acorn Computers to build the BBC micro, along with the later RISC based BBC/Acorn Archimedes. As many people know, Acorn stuck with RISC and eventually spun off ARM, which was, shall we say, quite successful. Would Acorn have survived long enough to do that without those BBC contracts? I don't know, but if documentaries I've seen are to be believed, they may not have. So does my my phone only work because of the BBC? 😉🤭🤥.

  CodeSnip  v4.20.2 has just been released. This is a recommended bug fix release. Full details can be found over on the  CodeSnip Blog .

Well, of course it had to happen. No sooner had Unit2NS v0.2.0 escaped into the wild than two irritating bugs reared their heads. So here's the resultant hotfix v0.2.1. As ever you can get the hotfix from GitHub as release v0.2.1-beta . For details of what got fixed see the change log .

I've released the first update to Unit2NS that adds a new feature. It also fixes some bugs. This release enables the program to create a "mapping" for any installed version of Delphi that supports unit scope names, without the user having to find the Delphi installation. I think pictures will explain this feature better than words. If you click either the New Mapping  or Edit Mapping  buttons on the main window you will see a dialogue box something like this: Unit2NS New Mapping Dialogue Box The button surrounding by the red box is new. Clicking it displays the Select Compiler  dialogue box: Unit2NS Select Compiler Dialogue Box Any version of Delphi you have installed that supports unit scope names will appear in the dialogue box. On my system, the only such compile is Delphi 11, as can be seen above. Select the required compiler and click OK . You will be returned to the  New Mapping  or  Edit Mapping  dialogue box, as appropriate, and will find that...

Another month goes by, another update of the OS detection code in my System Information Unit rolls out. The big change this time is that Windows 10 Version 22H2 has been released , and now TPJOSInfo detects it. There have also been some updates to recognise various Win 10 and Win 11 beta & dev channel builds that came along during October 2022. As usual you can  download this release from GitHub . Just scroll down to the Assets section to either grab the source code or download a zip file containing the official release files.