DelphiDabbler's Blog

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 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 .

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 .

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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...

The v0.4.0 update to my gbg garbage file generator program has just been released. It adds two new pairs of command to control the behaviour of the program in certain circumstances, as follows: By default gbg puts up a prompt to ask the use to confirm whether a pre-existing file should be overwritten. Two new options can be used to prevent this prompt from appearing: -o can be used to force the program to stop with an error if a file with the requested name already exists. -O is used to forcibly and silently overwrite any pre-existing file with the same name as the requested file. Similarly, a prompt is displayed asking the user whether to proceed when a file larger than 500Mb is specified. The following options can be used to prevent the prompt from appearing: -l can be used to force the program to stop with an error if a file larger than 500Mb is requested. -L is used to ignore the 500Mb size limit and to silently write a file of any size. From this version the compiler has bee...

Over a year since the first beta of v1.0.0 or the  BDiff / BPatch Utilities was released comes the 2nd beta. This release imposes some sensible constraints over parameter values of commands that can be passed to the BDiff file differ. It also restricts the maximum file size that can be diffed to the largest file size supported by the binary diff file format (2GiB - 1 byte), although you may get out of memory errors if you diff files this big! There a few other changes and fixes that can be found in the change log for this release. I've moved from Delphi 11 to 12 for compiling this code and Delphi 12 is the minimum supported compiler version. Get the latest release from GitHub .

My little command line Windows program, compfiledate , has had a bit of an overhaul. The program take two file names and compares either the creation date or modification dates of the files. Various comparison operators can be specified. Normally the program operates silently and returns 0 if the operator returns false and 1 if it returns true. Operators can be specified either in English or as mathematical operators. See the docs for a full list of operators and options. I've finally stopped compiling it with Delphi XE and moved to Delphi 12.1. Taking advantage of the move to Delphi 12.1 there's now a 64 bit version of the program in addition to the previous 32 bit exe. I've also fixed a bug that meant that "file not found" errors were returning a 0 to the OS instead of the desired error code (104). Other than that the release build process has been moved from Make to MSBuild. If you want a copy go to the GitHub release page . Here's a look at some command l...

In my determination to keep the old SWAG Pascal archive alive I've just released the first update to the SWAG viewer program that I originally released last year. It's still only at v0.2.0, so it's a bit rough around the edges. But, providing you install the SWAG archive properly, it works well enough. The program is targeted at 64 bit Windows, but there's a 32 bit build available if you need it. Now I know program is rather niche, so I'm not expecting a lot of interest, but if you want it you can  download v0.2.0 from GitHub . The Object Pascal source code is available on GitHub in the  ddabapps/swagview project. I've used Delphi 12.1 to compile it. If you've not used the program before you'll need to download the SWAG archive separately then install it from within the program. There's a help page that tells you how to do that. Here's what's changed in v0.2.0: A new feature to copy the displayed SWAG "packet" (code snippet) to t...

In the unlikely event that anyone wants to get in touch with me via Twitter / X this is just to say I've closed my account. Why? Well I've been spending less and less time on there as the platform has been turned into even more of a cesspit of hatred and misinformation. But now that the owner has personally tried to stir up far right racial hatred and violence in my country (the UK) I kind of object and I'm out of there.

Another quarter year has slipped past and its time to release an update to the  System Information Unit . We're up to v5.28.0 that recognises Windows 10 & 11 builds released from 1st April to 30 June 2024. Grab this release from the project's GitHub  releases page , where you can also read the change log. Microsoft have been steadily making it harder to distinguish all the various dev channel, canary channel, release preview channel versions, so I think I'm going to give up trying to detect them in future. It's tedious tracking down all the different build and revision numbers and tedium leads to errors.

Just released  CodeSnip  v4.23.0. This has a couple of minor changes relating to the UI. Read more about the new release over on the  CodeSnip blog . ⏬ Download the new release from the  v4.23.0 release page  on GitHub.

I can't believe a quarter of a year has passed since I last updated the System Information Unit , so here's v5.27.0 that recognises Windows 10 & 11 builds released from 1st January to 31 March 2024. Grab this release from the project's GitHub  releases page .

With 2024 just one and bit days old here in the UK, it's time to update to my  System Information Unit  to recognise Windows 10 & 11 builds released in December 2023. Say hello to release v5.26.0. Grab this release from the project's GitHub  releases page .