System Information Unit v5.32.0 released

This is a pretty big update to the System Information Unit: a piece of code I keep promising is on its way out!

Following a feature request on GitHub to provide access to the computer's UUID I hopped off down a rabbit hole BIOS related code and documentation. Once I discovered I needed to dig the UUID out of the BIOS I found a hole host of goodies sitting there.

So, instead of just adding a UUID method to TPJComputerInfo I ended up adding a whole new class, TPJBiosInfo, that gives access to some the the information stored in the BIOS. Well, providing your BIOS complies with the SMBIOS reference specification v2.0 or later it does. Otherwise the class does sweet FA.

Three of the methods of TPJBiosInfo duplicate (sort of) three methods of TPJComputerInfo. I say sort of because the TPJBiosInfo methods get their info directly from the BIOS, while TPJComputerInfo relies on the information being duplicated in the registry. In my case both approaches work, but I've read that the registry based method doesn't always deliver the goods. 

🠊 Anyhow, get the new version (5.32.0) from the GitHub release page.

The VCL & FMX versions of the demo program's have been updated, as have the docs.

Here's a screenshot of the VCL version of the demo program showing its shiny new TPJBiosInfo tab:



Comments

Post a Comment

Comments are very welcome, but please don't comment here if:

1) You have a query about, or a bug report for, one of my programs or libraries. Most of my posts contain a link to the relevant repository where there will be an issue tracker you can use.

2) You have a query about any 3rd party programs I feature, please address them to the developer(s) - there will be a link in the post.

3) You're one of the tiny, tiny minority who are aggressive or abusive - in the bin you go and reported you will be!

Thanks

Popular posts from this blog

Initialising dynamic arrays

When writing some unit tests a while ago I found myself needing to initialise some dynamic arrays with test data. It would be nice if we could do something like this: var A : array of Integer ; begin A := ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ) ; // !! WRONG end ; but we can't. So I decided to write some functions to initialise dynamic arrays to the contents of another array, be it a constant, a literal or another dynamic array. The result was a set of overloaded routines, one for each data type I needed to handle, for example for Integer and string arrays I had: function CloneArray ( const A : array of Integer ) : TIntegerDynArray ; overload ; var Idx : Integer ; begin SetLength ( Result , Length ( A ) ) ; for Idx := Low ( A ) to High ( A ) do Result [ Idx - Low ( A ) ] := A [ Idx ] ; end ; function CloneArray ( const A : array of string ) : TStringDynArray ; overload ; var Idx : Integer ; begin SetLength ( Result , Len...
Read more

Deleting elements from a dynamic array

In my blog " Initialising Dynamic Arrays " I mentioned I have been writing some unit tests that needed numerous repetative array initialisation operations. Well, one of the other common operations I found myself writing was the deletion of items from dynamic arrays. So I decided to find a generic way of doing this. Assuming we know the index of the item to be deleted we need the equivalent of Delphi's built-in Delete procedure for strings. If you read the previous post you won't be surprised to learn that I decided to further extend the Generics.Collections.TArray class by adding to the TArrayEx class I introduced there. My first attempt emulates Delphi's Delete procedure by deleting the array element in-place: i.e. it updates the array passed as a parameter. Unsurprisingly the method is called DeleteInPlace . Here's how it goes: type TArrayEx = class ( TArray ) public .. . class procedure DeleteInPlace < T > ( var A : ...
Read more