Sherlock

Just load it all at application or scene start. How large can those sprites be? It's a game, you may waste resources, it's kind of being expected anyway.

48 minutes ago, Markus Kinzler said:

Managed Reports were removed at last minute for 10.3 and postponed to 10.4

You either mean management reports or manged records... not sure which. Hmmmmm

Sorry, boss.

Wait a minute. A client should use a random port. Only the server needs fixed ports. So in theory you should be able to open thousands of http.Get in parallel. Do you set your client to use a fixed port as well?

Just now, David Heffernan said:

The eternal optimist

That's me

16 hours ago, TomDevOps said:

But anyway, for dead language with no future, it probably does not matter at all and I guess I should be happy that it happens to be that Delphi is still quite modern so some legacy code, still out there, can be even improved.

Well luckily this is not a Cobol forum - no wait, even that will not die (german article on 60 years of Cobol: https://www.heise.de/developer/meldung/60-Jahre-COBOL-Die-Sprache-die-nicht-totzukriegen-ist-4518334.html) Then another surely dead language maybe, let's try Fortran ... oops, not dead (https://www.vortech.nl/en/fortran-is-alive/).

TL;DR: Don't make unsustainable claims. 😉

I'm looking forward to a ton of bug fixes and performance improvements, for the IDE, the compiler(s) and the resulting executables. Considering the code name "Denali" is based on a mountain in Alaska a feature freeze could sound likely, but I doubt it. When Delphi Anchorage is finally released it will have some cool new features along with the obligatory cool new bugs... *Sigh*

2 hours ago, aehimself said:

And again - before generics, 64 MB RAM and 96 MB of pagefile was sufficient. After Generics Windows reaches OOM with 512 MB RAM and 768 MB of page file.

Wait. What? Megabytes? Really? I do recall W2k being quite thrifty with memory but that does not sound very likely.

This SO topic should point you in the right direction: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28329185/how-to-prevent-screen-lock-on-my-application-with-swift-on-ios

2 hours ago, David Heffernan said:

You don't need to explain what your code is doing. The code ready tells you the what. 

As an expansion to that, what code should have is a comment explaining the why.

I actually never heeded the warnings my FMX code generated when in ARC mode. I need Windows as well so...good on me, for once.

16 hours ago, David Heffernan said:

OK, so you agree with me. 

So do I. And I concede, that I should have mentioned FMX in my blanket statement. For VCL changes are quite rare, especially in "same name" releases (i.e. 10.3.2 -> 10.3.3).

When given the option to upgrade: Upgrade. Every single version. The individual steps between versions are not that big. We will most likely not be facing a brute like the Unicode disaster (in my eyes) like back in the day.

@David Schwartz: I seriously have to wonder, what needs to be done between Tokyo and Rio. In my (albeit not very broad) experience there should be nothing to do at all, except when using FMX, but then FMX forces to update anyway.

Sherlock

22 hours ago, Attila Kovacs said:

@Sherlock could you rename the topic that others can find it too?

Done

How sure do you have to be, that the signature is real? It is quite easy to let someone draw his signature in a TPaintbox, and then store the image as a BLOB in the DB. But if you need to make sure, this signature is real, then you would have to store the dynamics of its creation. That is tricky.

I personally know of two companies in my field of work (medical software), that have killed themselves over the "simple" task of moving from "some old outdated" language to C#. Both companies have enjoyed the questionable pleasure of being tutored by MS consultants. What everybody involved forgot, is the amount of customizing that went into the software for some special really needy customers - customizing, that went unnoticed or at least undocumented. So a bunch of features, and I mean a really big bunch, did not end up in the painfully created C# versions of their software, and the customers simply left. Because it got more expensive as well. And then from the customers POV it's just simple math: less features + more cost = bye bye.

Now both of those companies have been bought for a penny and a dime by the one I was in at the time. And constant rumors of the need to move to C# with our divisions software kept rolling around...but never became true (someone at the top must have learned something). New projects where done in other languages, but that is totally OK.

4 hours ago, Kas Ob. said:

and i am off to delete my account.

Now please don't do that! I would say, that is a bit of an overreaction.

This is not the final name for the thread, it's just all I came up with in my ignorance. I am open for improvements.

So, if anyone would like to contribute something to this topic, stay here, you're good. If you have something to say about umm... Hashing Dictionaries and such, this is not the place to be

While you weren't looking it got split to here:

OK, I'll try to fork it then.

Lemme see now, where did I put my magic wand?

Soooo, I know I am not free of guilt either , but nevertheless, how about a nice swerve back to the topic please? And as a reminder, the topic is "As a Delphi expert, do you ever need to refactor or improve your code?"

If there is an interest to further the discussion on dictionaries, I am happy to break the forum by trying to fork that discussion

I believe Stefans words to be a fitting final statement on the subject of comments and suggest veering back to the subject at hand...namely refactoring 😉

Of course comments explaining every line of code are all in all useless. I'm talking about comments informing the uninformed reader what the heck is going on, and why a problem is solved this way and not another (hence preventing aforementioned refactoring odysseys). Most times those comments form the core of my technical file and only need a little fleshing out and graphs to be acceptable for auditors.

Just now, David Heffernan said:

I find this to be a very apt principle.

Well, clearly I'm not there yet, and neither is any of the folks whose code I've had the chance to read.

17 minutes ago, Fr0sT.Brutal said:

There was several cases when I looked and thought "what I was thinking, this stuff is ugly and non-optimal, I'll fix it in a minute", but after N hours of redesigning the code I realized "Aaaaahhh I meant THAT thing!" and reverted old code but now prepending it with extensive comments entitled with "There be dragons" magic phrase  xD

That's what comments are for. I don't see wisdom or a particularly high level of expertise in the words "Good code needs no comments, it is self explanatory".