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@dummzeuch I just wanted to let you know that I just discovered that "new" Edit Path expert. And I only noticed it because I saw your last commit (10 minutes ago) with the bug fix. This expert is so much more convenient for editing the unit search path than the usual way through Project -> Options -> select the target with the mouse -> select the search path with the mouse -> Press Alt+Down -> (and then of course Press Alt+M to get to the memo view that GExperts provides). Every blody time I had to change something in that path I was cursing the person who came up with this cumbersome design of the dialog. Thanks a bucket, Thomas! A shame that I missed your blog post about it and discovered it only just now.

Yes, it reminds me of the learning curve involved with learning object-oriented programming. I find that authentication is one thing, but I'd prefer to be able to use a framework that has the DB and everything in place so I don't have to create all of that infrastructure. It's kind of like buying a lock and having to build your own doors and mechanisms to work with it. I'd rather have an entire doorframe and door with a lock already installed and a safe persistent store where users can register, you can collect money (once or on a recurring basis) and set the different membership levels if you want more than one. THAT seems like it would make for a valuable SaaS solution someone could offer. And generaing a complete Docker container sounds like a great idea as well. I'm in the process of trying to deploy my first rev of my back-end to a Windows host and it's not working as expected. Probably networking issues. Windows has lots of layers that I'm not familiar with -- I've aleays had IT people to help deal with that crap. Too many moving parts ... it needs to be simplified. 🙂

The trouble with web is less about the development of the user interfaces (web apps), but more that most developers that did desktop application development their whole life are still stuck in desktop developer paradigmns. They are stuck not only in the UI paradigmns, but also have often no clue how authentication works, how to build software for zero trust environments, how to deploy the whole stack, etc, how to work with the latency. For those it would need a new generation of RAD tools. An IDE that lets them build client and server, auth and everything is handled by the framework and when they press "build" they get a docker container ready for deployment.

Nnnnoooooo!!!!! Yes, Tim is a one man shop, but he poduces excellent products at a great price and excellent support. Let's keep it that way....

In my mind, a "professional" is simply someone who gets paid for their time and effort. I think you're confusing skill level with compensation. College Professors write lots of high-quality code, but often do it for no additional compensation. And there are plenty of people fresh out of a "bootcamp" who get paid to write code who barely know what they're doing. While I do agree with your point to a certain extent, there are plenty of problems that don't require much context to reach a viable solution. In my experience, 30%-50% of most coding involves moving data from here to there -- ETL if you will. That kind of thing can be done by a robot that has no understanding of the larger context. It's self-contained, and if you spend too much time on it, you're wasting your time. For example, the code to move things in one direction looks like this: aaa := bbb; while the code to copy the other way looks like this: bbb := aaa; Show me something that will take two classes with 5, 10, or 100 fields and generate the code for Assign methods both ways, especially if some of the members are records or objects themselves? This kind of stuff is B-O-R-I-N-G and SHOULD BE AUTOMATED, IMHO, but I don't know of anything that does it. If you then inject a data transfer in between, like aaa --> send --> rcv --> aaa and the data transfer might be JSON or an array, or Base64 encoding, with or without encryption/decryption ... again, it's a lot of work, and totally mechanical. The problem with this extremely common coding pattern is that it does not lend itself to anything we have in our current toolboxes. Copy-and-paste is out; regular expression search-and-replace won't work; and writing something that's general enough is just awfully complicated unless there's a lot more meta-data available from the compiler or IDE. Most vendors I know refuse to provide access to that level of meta-data even though their compilers gather it regularly and the IDEs often make use of it. So if something like ChatGPT can do it, I'm all for that. This is not something that needs to be "optimal" since there's not much to optimize; it needs to be done quickly and easily updated. I've been playig around wiht ChatGPT and am really surprised at how quickly it can generate useful code for specific needs. It might not compile or run properly right off the bat, but there's both "bones" and a lot of viable "meat" on them. I'd typically reorganize things before using it, but it's like having someone write a draft of an article and then using that material as the basis for a more complete article. That kind of thing is done all the time in the written world (magazines, books, ad copy, web sites, etc.). From what I've seen so far, ChatGPT is far more skilled than your basic intern at writing code that solves a specific problem, as long as you can describe what you want clearly. I would not expect the results to be drop-in ready. However, the time it takes to go from "problem statement" to "working code" is WAY SHORTER than doing it all yourself by hand. And THAT is where the VALUE lies here.

This is it.

That's what I have done and it works. The trick is to use an empty template and then from WM_INITDIALOG create a parented Delphi VCL form.