DelphiDabbler's Blog

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 [...

If you have been a subscriber to my mailing lists you may have noticed that there have been no mailings since about June 2010. That's because I've decided to stop producing newsletters. The reason? I'm afraid I just don't have the time. There are more efficient and much more timely ways of getting site news out there via news feeds and through my Twitter account. Here are the RSS feed links: DelphiDabbler.com site news CodeSnip program and Code Snippets Database news DelphiDabbler Code Library News Delphi Tips News This blog Twitter My twitter account is @delphidabbler . And don't worry, I don't (t)witter on about my personal life - you won't get to know about my dogs' birthdays (both 13 in January actually - damn!) or what brand of perfume my wife likes - it's just limited to site and blog news! Finally my website's news section pulls most of this stuff together.

I've started development of version 4 of CodeSnip , the Delphi source code snippets editor and viewer. I am inviting suggestions for new features. If you have any ideas please use the project's Feature Tracker on SourceForge. If you prefer to discuss your ideas then please leave a comment to this posting. There's a new branch of CodeSnip 's Subversion repository that contains the v4 development code. I've only just started work on this and I don't expect to release the first beta for a number of months yet. In the meantime I will be maintaining the v3 code base and may even add some simple enhancements. But don't expect any major changes to v3.

Another day another unit test and another extension to my little TArrayEx class. This time I found myself having to concatenate some dynamic arrays. After solving the problem for the particular array type I decided to produce a generic solution. Here's the method I came up with: type TArrayEx = class ( TObject ) public .. . class function Concat < T > ( const Arrays : array of TArray < T > ) : TArray < T > ; .. . end ; The method takes an array of the arrays you want to concatenate (don't forget the [] notation) and returns the concatenated array. Here's an example where the resultant array A contains the integers 1 to 10 in order: var A , A1 , A2 , A3 : TArray < Integer > ; begin A1 := TArray < Integer > . Create ( 1 , 2 , 3 ) ; A2 := TArray < Integer > . Create ( 4 , 5 , 6 ) ; A3 := TArray < Integer > . Create ( 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 ) ; A := TArrayEx . Conc...

Some users of the components and units from the DelphiDabbler Code Library have contacted me to ask if the library's help is available in HTML help format because WinHelp format I used for the library won't work by default on Windows Vista and later. The answer is no - and I don't have time to do the conversions. However, all is not lost because there is now a Wiki for each of the Code Library projects hosted on Google Code. In future the Wikis will be updated in preference to the old WinHelp help files. View the list of available Wikis . Source code highlighting by DelphiDabbler PasHi .