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Newer Delphi versions do not create these files anymore since that did only allow one single backup version to be maintained. The _history folder allows multiple versions of the backup, which is much more useful in my opinion.

To avoid flooding another thread with unrelated posts about VCL quality and bugs, I have opened this topic for discussion about VCL in general and VCL Styles. First, I would like to respond to comment made by @Attila Kovacs VCL is not abandoned, not even close. Maybe it is not receiving too many new features as people would hope so, but it has more to do with its maturity than anything else. FMX (is) was in frenzy development cycle, only because it didn't have the needed features VCL already had, and it still does not have all. So it may have seemed that FMX is getting all the love and attention, but that was not the case. Many new Windows related features introduced since FMX has come to play, are still VCL only. Keep in mind that IDE is based on VCL, and I don't see that changing in foreseeable future. VCL is evolving and it will continue to evolve. It is not that FMX is new better, improved framework mean to replace VCL for all purposes, it is framework with completely different architecture and it covers different use cases. While some functionality certainly overlaps, and there are (Windows only) applications where both VCL and FMX can be chosen, there are also applications where VCL is far better (and sometimes, even only viable) choice. VCL Styles are buggy, they have been buggy since they were introduced in XE2. But, they are now part of the IDE. That means two things. First, IDE is now suffering from some bugs, but it also means that those bugs will get fixed sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, not all bugs can be solved overnight, and the more specific, reproducible bug reports there are, the higher are chances that those bugs will get a fix. If you have any filed VCL bug reports you might want to share, please do so.

@Steve Maughan you might want to read: Converting 32-bit Delphi Applications to 64-bit Windows since the original code was doing things that were not meant to be done in 64bit builds to begin with.

This Websocket client problem should be fixed in SVN and the overnight zip, assuming it was an ANSI/Unicode casting problem with non-English character set conversions, which I'm unable to reproduce. It did not affect Websocket server which had no casting, and yet always worked against our client. The real problem is ICS has overloaded versions of many functions for ANSI and Unicode, and the compiler does not always choose the correct version if input and output parameters don't match, fixed by using a specific ANSI function. I'm slowly adding TBytes versions for binary data to avoid such problems. but it's a long job. Angus

It will crash if the top thirty-two bits of any pointer handled by the buggy code are not all zeroes. That just happens more often if ASLR is enabled or all the time if ASLR + the high entropy allocator is enabled.

Now I see that FieldData can be defined for max 256 fields. FieldData: array [0..255] of PAnsiChar; And get rid of setting the length of FieldData for every field. uDBF.pas

I used FieldData array to store offsets instead of FData that must remain 4 bytes. Maybe there are better approaches but it was faster so. This is a fast patch and not optimal. uDBF.pas

FData : DWORD; And should be 8 bytes on 64 bit. Something like PAnsiChar. Fields^[iFieldCount].FData := DWORD(Data + iTmp); It is wrong to cast to DWORD for 64 bit.

Yes, but then you set up the fields' FData to point to there +iTmp and later you are trying to read the data from there, and AV raises. But if I'm wrong just ignore me, I had only a minute to look into it.

So, I've updated to Delphi 12 from Berlin, and I have to say, it's a big {expletive} WOW, especially during the first couple of hours. What immediately stands out is that the IDE is much faster, both in terms of code and graphics. (There were zero issues installing it and both old and new IDE's are running parallel.) But as I proceed, some questions are slowly arising... I'm currently converting my experts, and I can't find the clipboard history window/function in Delphi 12. Has it been removed? Also, the web is full of help files with custom managed records and their constructors and destructors, but it doesn't work and I accidentally found a user comment on Marco's blog that it became the initialize and finalize operators. Does it? Is there any reading on how this evolved and if there are any drawbacks/pitfalls or can I start converting my "smart" objects to use that?

Clipboard history was removed. The argument (probably valid) was that the Windows clipboard history does the job just as well (or better). Use left hand "Windows icon" key combined with "V" to bring up clipboard history.

Uploaded the latest version - you can download from https://files.spring4d.com/UsesHelper/latest/UsesHelperSetup.zip

Yup, he did it on Dec 21, 2020