Leaderboard

But why did you use ODBC when you can use the Firedac Driver ?

I compared Delphi with industrial software, because the probable sales are more homogeneous in terms of numbers than the sales of houses like Microsoft or Epic (I think they sell millions of copies)... However the problem (I repeat) is definitely not the download of the software (I understand that you would like to have everything perfect) as much as its possible activation. And this is because the activation process (without an subscription license) includes contact with a possible third-party commercial company whose "core business" is the sale of products (including "subscription licenses"), as @Uwe Raabe has highlighted. The state of affairs is this, and if the normal measures of the "good father of a family" (in Italy they say so) are adopted at the time of purchase, there will certainly be much fewer problems in the future.

Rather than using a separate class in the TListItem.Data property, it would be safer and more efficient to derive a new class from TListItem and add whatever members you want to it, and then return that class type from the ListView's OnCreateItemClass event. You can then type-cast any TListItem in the ListView to your custom class type when needed, and you don't have to worry about freeing them manually. For example: type TMyListItem = class(TListItem) public BoldText: Boolean; end; procedure TForm8.ListView1CreateItemClass(Sender: TCustomListView; var ItemClass: TListItemClass); begin ItemClass := TMyListItem; end; procedure TForm8.ListView1AdvancedCustomDrawSubItem(Sender: TCustomListView; Item: TListItem; SubItem: Integer; State: TCustomDrawState; Stage: TCustomDrawStage; var DefaultDraw: Boolean); begin if TMyListItem(Item).BoldText then Sender.Canvas.Font.Style := [fsBold]; end; ... var li := ListView1.Items.Add; TMyListItem(li).BoldText := True; Of course, in this particular example, there is a much simpler solution - just look at the data being drawn and act accordingly, eg: procedure TForm8.ListView1AdvancedCustomDrawSubItem(Sender: TCustomListView; Item: TListItem; SubItem: Integer; State: TCustomDrawState; Stage: TCustomDrawStage; var DefaultDraw: Boolean); begin if (SubItem > 0) and (StrToInt(Item.SubItems[SubItem-1]) < 0) then Sender.Canvas.Font.Style := [fsBold]; end;

Back in the 90's I used to love beta-testing stuff. I'd get free licenses for my efforts. Companies gradually stopped doing that. They made beta testing seem like they were doing certain users a favor by giving them an early look at the code. I tried that for a little while and never felt like anybody cared about anything I reported. It seemed like what we got as "beta" code was a copy of what was sent to manufacturing because nothing I found and reported was ever fixed. With Delphi, it got to the point where I not only stopped wasting my time looking at betas, I won't use any of the .0 releases until at least one patch has been issued. The vast majority of projects I've worked on were often at least one release behind, simply because there was usually nothing added from one major release to the next that added any value that exceeded the risk of having stable code get screwed-up. Last place I was at, there was a guy there for 7 years whose main job was rebuilding everything in the latest updates, doing a tiny bit of refactoring, and running tests for months to determine if it was "safe" to upgrade to the latest Delphi Release. Another group worked with C# and they were constantly upgrading, mostly because of improvements in core parts of the language and support environment. It always seemed to get more upgrades in one release as Delphi got in the past dozen. Of course, they had a whole team of guys working on their code, which was only a fraction of the size of our code base, and much buggier. I've applied for the Delphi betas only to be able to read the "What's New" docs. It became increasingly hard to get any of that data as they started tying it to the license level (price) you had purchased. But working for companies with a dozen or two licences (mainly just Pro), we'd get a conference call with one of the techs who'd go through the entire set of slides discussing new features, and they'd bust their humps to get us the early docs, beta code, and loved it when we'd send them feedback. We got the same treatment as when I was an MVP, but we were just regular customers with a bunch of licenses. And as an MVP, I put in dozens of hours of my time and didn't even get a complimentary license for my efforts. I had to pay for it out-of-pocket just like everybody else once the one-year license I was given to use while promoting Delphi for Embt expired. Now their licensing is so aligned with their financial needs that they look more like a car company than a software company. The past few major releases add more and more stuff that's targeted at enterprise needs and continue to ignore core things that have been ignored for a decade now. I don't know why I should keep paying a license fee for something that continues to keep adding stuff I'll never use while core things that newer languages and platforms keep refining and expanding upon.

It seems like Premium subscription gives you "advanced" beta access. For Standard it says there is access to beta for each major version release. So reading between the lines and knowing that current beta is just an update, this might mean that only Premium subscribers will have access to this beta. https://www.embarcadero.com/support