DelphiDabbler's Blog

I'm getting on with developing CodeSnip v5 and have been thinking of ditching some features that have struck me as particularly useless. These are all features I haven't used personally since CodeSnip v1. They are: The Save Snippet option from the File menu. The related Copy Snippet option from the View menu. Before I delete the features I'm looking for some feedback as to whether anyone uses them and can't live without them. If you want to keep them in v5 please get in touch. If I don't hear any howls of protest, the features are going to go! Let me know what you think either by commenting or sending me a message via my website's contact page . What follows is a little overview of what the features do. All these options do is to generate something like the following and either put it on the clipboard or write it to file: { * This code snippet was generated by DelphiDabbler CodeSnip Release 4.8.0 on * Mon, 16 Sep 2013 16:53:57 GMT. It is made available ...

At the end of December last year I blogged that new snippets added to the Code Snippets Database would no longer be visible when the database was viewed with CodeSnip v1 and v2. Despite CodeSnip 1 and 2 being prevented from viewing new snippets any existing snippets continued to have bug fixes applied. But today that all changed and from now on the database is frozen with respect to these programs: the database will still be available for download, but it will never change. Also from today any original v0 beta releases of CodeSnip will no longer be able to even download the database - tying to do so will generate an error. If you're one of the few remaining users of these early CodeSnip versions please update . BTW I'm not pulling support for these old version out of spite. It's just that the Code Snippets database is being overhauled and maintaining support for these old programs is no longer viable.

DelphiDabbler.com is now back up and running following the recent outage . If you are a CodeSnip user, the automatic database updating service may have failed during the outage and you could have missed an update. If you want to check if there are any database updates available please check manually using the Database | Update From Web menu option. For info, the last update was on 14th June. If you rely on CodeSnip's program update notification that too may also have failed. For info the latest version at the moment in v4.6.0. If you're running and earlier version and want to update you can download v4.6.0 from SourceForge.

Just a quick note to say that my website, DelphiDabbler.com, has been disabled, for what reason I'm not sure - trying to resolve it. Until I can get this sorted, if you're looking for CodeSnip program updates, please look on SourceForge ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/codesnip/ ). CodeSnip database updates won't be available until the site is up again. If you are wanting files from my Delphi Library, please check out the ddab-lib project on GoogleCode. More news when I have it. Update 2013/06/15 09:47 BST: Seems my web hosting company thinks I've not renewed the account although I have done. Waiting for them to sort it out. Update 2013/06/15 10:30 BST: The site is now working again . At least my web host admits their mistakes and apologises!

On occasions I've wanted to provoke all actions in an action list to update themselves - when waiting for the application to update them when idle isn't soon enough. I would have thought that TActionList would have a suitable method, but it doesn't seem to. To save having to come up with the same hack over and again, I've started using this class helper: type TActionListHelper = class helper for TCustomActionList public procedure Update ; end ; .. . procedure TActionListHelper . Update ; var Action : TContainedAction ; begin for Action in Self do Action . Update ; end ; You can now update all the actions in an action list by calling the Update that has been injected into any TActionList instance. Seems to work so I thought I'd share it. If you've got a better way, please comment. Source code highlighting by DelphiDabbler PasHi .

Just announcing that I'm about to start work on the next major update to CodeSnip , i.e. version 5. So if you use CodeSnip 4 and have any new features you'd like to see in CodeSnip 5, now's the time to let me know. You can see the current requests, and make your own, using the Feature Request tickets on SourceForge. You can also up- or down- vote requests there. I'm considering a radical overhaul of the way the program handles snippets - and will be trying to integrate the current read-only snippets downloaded from the Code Snippets Database with your own snippets more seemlessly. The other main thrust will be the ability to more easily share snippets with others both directly and online. If you think that's the right way to go please tell me, and suggest how you see it. My aim is to get something working (a preview or a beta) by the year end the end of Q2, 2014 . As ever, no promises! EDIT - timings have slipped. Why does everything always take longer than plan...

Time for a quick rant before breakfast! Late last year I bought Delphi XE3 with the aim of using it instead of Delphi 2010 to work on release 5 of my CodeSnip program. I was just about to start last week when Delphi XE4 was released, so I decided to get the £40 upgrade (without the iOS stuff) to that and use it instead of XE3. So yesterday I did the first test compile of the current CodeSnip 4 code base. After fixing a few incompatibilities I got my first successful build. Only it wasn't. XE4 crashed with an out of memory error. The error happens if I do a normal compile. A full build works. Here's the rub - even if I do a full Shift+F9 rebuild I still can't run the program in the IDE's debugger because attempting to run an already compiled program results in the out of memory error! Could it be dependancy checking that's causing the problem? Well that's a £40 update fee up the spout. Not a happy bunny. It gets worse. The problem still exists in XE3. So there...