Anders Melander

That's what she said Sorry

There are undoubtedly different opinions about this but I would say that you should completely separate design- and compile-time stuff. Build and install your design-time package and never mind where the dcu files for that are located. Just don't have them output to the same folder as the source. I would probably place them (via the package project options) in a sub-folder of the package source but you could just as well delete them once the package is installed because they are only needed to build the package. Reference the source files directly, or via the search path, in your project and have the dcu's output to the project dcu folder. Do not include the dcu output folder in your project search path.

Impressive! I could have used this when I reverse engineered the pdb file format. I have one suggestion based on a quick look though the source: It seems data is read unbuffered and edits are done directly on the source (file/disk/memory). This is fine as it allows one to edit huge binary files without loading them into memory (which surprisingly is what many other hex editors does). One thing I could wish for would be a mode that cached edits in memory and then allowed those edits to be applied/committed to the source on demand. You could probably implement this with a block cache layer on top of your existing data source layer.

Sure, but that's hardly worth USD 600/year. Most of the stuff on that list is just repackaging of their existing features. Pfft!

Fork the repository. Create a branch on your fork. Apply the changes to your branch. Push the changes to your fork. Create a pull request to have your branch merged into the original repository.

Do you have AutoSize=True on the labels?

You can create a run-time package containing synedit (a run-time package is a DLL) and link against that but one way or the other you are going to create a dependency on synedit and compiling it directly into your project is the the option that will give you the least problems.

Not very shocking if you understood what was going on. When you install a component your code will be run as a part of the IDE process. If your component code goes into an endless loop then you will have hung the IDE. Nothing surprising there. So is Delphi. I'm assuming you're a hobbyist because otherwise VS isn't free AFAIK.

No you don't. I understand why you used it but there are always better ways to solve a problem than using [weak]. Contrary to what the documentation states [weak] isn't named named after the type of reference. It's named after the design skills of people who choose to use it to manage references. 🙂

P.S. Tabs are Evil!

Why? What problem are you trying to solve? While I'm definitely a proponent of interfaces at a higher level, at low level they often just obfuscate the code. Apart from that I think your solution has a number of "smells": Why is the TDrawingObject.ObjectType writable? Does the ObjectType really need to change after construction? Why is TDrawingObject.DrawingObjectsList writable? Who owns the list? (might have been covered before. TL;DR) Instead of exposing the whole TObjectList<> class, expose only the relevant parts (Add, Remove, Enumerator). See: Why is TDrawingObjectsList.OwnsObjects part of the API? Isn't the ownership an implementation detail?

So evidently there's another problem with your code. You can start by showing us the call stack (click the Details button).

Don't insert tabs in your source. Don't use [weak] Use the notification mechanism built into TComponent: type TComponentA = class(TComponent, IComponentAl) private FComponentB: TComponentB; private procedure SetComponentB(const Value: TComponentB); protected procedure Notification(AComponent: TComponent; Operation: TOperation); override; published property ComponentB: TComponentB read FComponentB write SetComponentB; end; procedure TComponentA.SetComponentB(const Value: TComponentB); begin if (FComponentB <> nil) then FComponentB.RemoveFreeNotification(Self); FComponentB := Value; if (FComponentB <> nil) then FComponentB.AddFreeNotification(Self); end; procedure TComponentA.Notification(AComponent: TComponent; Operation: TOperation); begin inherited; if (AComponent = FComponentB) and (Operation = opRemove) then FComponentB := nil; end;

https://torry.net/pages.php?id=112#939914 It probably doesn't work with the current version of Graphics32, because the GR32 polygon classes has been redesigned since it was written, but it will probably work with the version of Graphics32 available on the same page at torry.net That's correct. It's abandonware but that's not been a problem for me in the one project were it's used since it's a fairly small library and the functionality is limited. AFAIR it took me about an hours to integrate it into the application where it's used but of course I already knew Graphics32 so that helped a lot. Let me know if you want to see the source of the unit using it. To each their own - but I think I could have typed 200 lines of code in the time it has taken me to locate the library and write this message 🙂

Unless you're working on a 1970s vector monitor all vectors eventually ends up as raster graphics... Graphics32 has a pretty extensive (and fast) vector layer. Image32 is the same in that regard; A vector layer on top of a raster layer. I would have thought that GR32_Objects would fit the bill but it seems like the couple of hundred lines of code required to implement a complete object based vector drawing application is too large an effort.

I found a copy in one of my old projects. Attached. But... Instead of using 25 year old, undocumented, and probably superseded APIs it might be a better idea to use something like WMI. There are lots of libraries that makes use of WMI easy from Delphi. This one for example: https://bitbucket.org/anders_melander/windows-management-wrappers/src/master/Source/amWindowsManagementInstrumentation.pas NTUnits100.zip NTLowLevel100.zip

Law of Triviality. Every body's got an opinion about the bike shed but do we really need a video and an endless thread about it?

On a positive note: 11,156 dreaded Python while only 797 dreaded Delphi... From that we can conclude that Python is almost 14 times more unpopular than Delphi! Woohoo!

...and PowerShell pays 15% better than C, C++ and C#... Yeah, right - but then again, you'd have to throw really big bucks at me to get me to touch that crap.

Excellent question 🙂 First of all I would recommend that you use the TField.DisplayLabel property instead of the column Caption property unless you have a good reason not to. If you use TField.DisplayLabel then all columns that are bound to that field will automatically use that value as their caption and as a bonus you will only have to translate that value one place. The reason you're not seeing the Caption property of the TcxGrid*Column components is that the value isn't stored in the DFM and BTM can only see the properties that are stored in the DFM... Now, why isn't it stored? Well, the value has most likely been omitted from the DFM because it's the same as the FieldName. If you look at the TcxCustomGridTableItem.Caption property you will see that it has a stored directive. The stored directive controls if the property is stored in the DFM. In this case it will be stored if you have specified an explicit value and this value is different from the default value. So what is the default value? In this case the default value comes from the DisplayLabel property of the TDataSet field you have bound the column to. Again, if you haven't specified an explicit TField.DisplayLabel then the value of DefaultLabel defaults to TField.FieldName, in which case that value is also omitted from the DFM. Now you might think that the solution is to just specify an explicit Caption or DisplayLabel and that will probably work in most cases. However it will not work in the cases where this value is the same as the FieldName, because then the default rule will again cause it to be omitted from the DFM since it isn't needed. The solution is to "synthesize" the properties that have been omitted. By synthesize them I mean inject the "missing" properties into the translation project as if they were present in the DFM. If you go into the BTM settings there's an option to have BTM synthesize missing properties for you: The way it works is that when BTM reads the forms of the source application (e.g. during an Update), it runs the synthesize rules against each component that it find in the form. If a rule determines that a property is missing then a property is injected into the project with the specified name and value. I believe the above screenshot shows the default rule (preinstalled, but disabled by default): Type mask: ^T([A-Z][a-z]+)+Field$ A regular expression matching a component type. In this case the expression will match the different TField components (TIntegerField, TStringField, etc). Property name: DisplayLabel A property name. If this property is missing then it will be created in the translation project. Property value: @FieldName The value to assign the property. This can be an explicit value or the value of another property. In this case the @ specifies that we want the value of another property, namely the FieldName property. So let's say your application had a DFM with the following: ... object MyQuery: TFDQuery SQL.Strings = ('select name from users') object MyQueryUserName: TStringField FieldName = 'name' Size = 50 end end ... with the synthesize rules enabled BTM would import the above as if it looked like this: ... object MyQuery: TFDQuery SQL.Strings = ('select name from users') object MyQueryUserName: TStringField FieldName = 'name' DisplayLabel = 'name' Size = 50 end end ... Synthesized properties can be identified in the grid by their color (I believe the light green is the default - it can be customized): One thing to be aware of is that the synthesize option currently is an application level setting. This means that if you only enable it on one system and then update the project on another then the synthesized properties will be marked "Unused" which means that they will be removed if you Purge the project. I'll be fixing that "real soon now". If you run BTM in portable mode and include the portable config file in your version control (which I would recommend), then the above should not become a problem. Speaking from experience :-/ If you prefer to do the translation on the TcxGrid*Column level then you can use the following rule: Type mask: ^TcxGrid[a-zA-Z]*Column$ Property name: Caption Property value: @DataBinding.FieldName It seems there is a minor bug with adding synthesize rules so after adding the rule you should restart BTM and everything should be fine. I'll look into that. Fixed (but not yet built and uploaded).

From our POW there are primarily two reason to pay maintenance on a product (any product): If you need access to the latest version regularly, the yearly subscription fee is cheaper than paying for a new license each time. Support the supplier financially so they are able to keep the product alive. Since DevExpress seems to have done "the right thing" here, we're not about to punish them for that. Yes, we can expect lower output from them for a while while they get a new team up to speed, but unless development complete stalls, for an extended period of time, we can live with that. With regard to the mentioned limit on support I think it's entirely reasonable. That was not our problem. Our problem was more pertaining to the perceived increasingly non-committal responses we got when we raised issues regarding deficiencies in the products. Now that I know the state of things it makes much better sense.

I think they will relocate FYI:

Since I brought up DevExpress' association with Russia in this thread I think it's only fair that I share the response I just got from DevExpress on the matter. I sent the following to Julian Bucknall (DevExpress CTO) earlier today: and I just got the following response (emphasis mine) from Ray Navasarkian (DevExpress CEO): So I guess that puts that topic to rest for my part. I too would have liked a roadmap and I can't quite understand why they can't produce something, but apparently that's just the way it is. Indeed!

There's a difference between someone spying on me for their own gains and someone trying to harm me just because they're angry at everybody else. I'm not that concerned about the former.