dummzeuch

The easiest way to protect against ELC server failures, is running it in a VM and keeping a working backup of that machine. We use a XenServer VM and run ELC under a minimal Ubuntu server, so the backups aren't that large.

Depends who you ask. I have the impression that the terms of these licenses and what kind of restrictions they impose is not that widely known in the company. But I might be wrong. I don't remember reading about a restriction of 3 installations (but I may have overlooked it) and since there is no way to see the number of (passive) installations in ELC and also no way to unregister an installation I don't see how they could enforce it. Of course they could update the ELC software to enforce it and have new Delphi versions require the update. Maybe that's not 3 installations in total but 3 active installations, that is "the IDE is running" at the same time? For me even only 3 installations would have been better than being stuck with a debugging problem on a Friday with no way to install Delphi on the computer in question, because a "bump" was not possible until Monday (or at all). I think we currently have about 20 Delphi 2007 installations, most of them are only used once or twice a year, some not even once a year. But when I need them, it's usually in a hurry. But not all these installations are Network Named User licenses, we had quite a few ordinary licenses before, that were either from an upgrade or came for free with later Delphi versions. These were never converted.

Neither does Borland or Codegear.

You are right: ELC only covers Delphi 2007 and later. Delphi 6 and 7 did not need activation, that was optional. I'm not sure about Delphi 2005 and 2006 though.

While you have a valid subscription, convert your license to a "Network named user license" and install the Embarcadero License Center (server under e.g. Ubuntu on a virtual machine). Then you can have as many installations on your LAN as you want and even use several at the same time (there is a limit, but I haven't hit it yet). And you will never again need a "bump" either.

Just to make that clear: The url Dave posted is for browsing the source code in a web browser, not for downloading it with subversion. The url for subversion is this: https://svn.code.sf.net/p/gexperts/code/trunk

The correct url is https://svn.code.sf.net/p/gexperts/code/trunk . And there is howto on cmpiling it here: https://blog.dummzeuch.de/gexperts-documentation/compiling-gexperts/ I guess you got the zip file from sourceforge's "generate snapshot" function. I have never used it, no idea if and how it works. I just now discovered that there is such a button. I got a snapshot of revisoin 3141 and it looks OK. Which files are missing? Maybe I forgot to commit something.

I got one (actually I got several), but you might be right about the billing address being the receiver for those emails.

That would be typical: Just when my (Corona restricted) vacation is over and I don't have time to play with it.

Don’t you just hate it when computers try to be clever but get it wrong? OK, it’s not really the computer itself but the programmer who tried to be clever. The problem usually is that he overlooked a corner case that you then hit where his sophisticated strategy fails and leaves you with something – lets say less desirable. Today I wasted several hours trying to find out what was wrong with my hack to create a TSpeedButton which can take the input focus (which standard TSpeedButtons can’t), by using a TBitBtn instead. I blogged about this before. There was a certain button width which caused the button to display only a square part of the caption. At closer inspection it turned out to not be a fixed width but kind of a width to height ratio that caused the problem. Here are several buttons with different widths and heights that show this behaviour: read on in my blog post.

I probably knew that too, many years ago, but have since forgotten, or at least didn't think of it when I saw this bug.

Quite hard, all least if I tried to do that for the whole GExperts. It not only uses many calls of the OTAPI but also hacks into the known native forms and components structure. It might be possible for some of the experts, if they can be separated from the rest. Given the size, long history and large number of developers who left their mark in the code, there are too many interdependencies to make that an easy task. I tried to clean up a bit, but on the other hand I'm probably also the one who introduced new dependencies over the - wow, more than 10 - years I have been involved in the project.

I'm assuming with "Delphi Windows application" you mean the IDE: Create a batch file that adds to the path, and then starts the IDE (and exits so the console window closes). If you don't want a batch file (many people complain about the "ugly console window"): Write a program that creates a new environment variable block and pass that when executing the IDE.

We have Delphi, we don't need no fchking brainf*ck or whitespace. x=3

BTW: Yesterday I finally found and fixed a problem in GExperts which caused an access violation on IDE shutdown (an OTAPI interface reference that wasn't released after use). But it was caught and logged by an exception handler, so nobody using a release version of GExperts should have seen it. The fix was exactly one line of code, but it took me hours to track it down. The fun with working on IDE plugins: You can reproduce the problem, you see the call stack, you can even single step to the last line of your own code before it happens, but then you only get lots of assembler code of the IDE and other plugins which tells you nothing about what happens.

There are many of those stories. I heard about a Novell (remember them?) server which had been used for years but the company had forgotten where it was located. It was eventually found after a decade of uptime, still working fine. I think that's simply an urban legend, but it might also have been a marketing story.

That's a common misconception: You will have to make the source code available to everybody you give the binary. So, of it's a commercial application, that means you must give your customers the source code of your application as well as the source code of every library you used. On top of that you cannot restrict how they use that source code, as long as they adhere to the GPL. But you don't need to make the source code publicly available.

Another thing I just found out is that the Grep expert uses a regular expression for the exclude dirs option. It first escapes meta characters (e.g. '.', '*', '\' etc.), replaces ';' with '|' and then uses the result as a case insensitive regular expression to match the full directory name and the full file name. Every directory or file that matches the regex is excluded from the search. The help says this: Exclude Dirs: A semicolon separated list of directories to exclude from the search (the exclusion is done via a substring match on the full directory and file name) I always assumed that this filter is only applied to the name of subdirectories and that it does a full match, e.g. 'src' matches the 'src' subdirectory only, not just any directory name that contains the string 'src', e.g. 'deleted-src'. And I never expected it to match a file name like 'somesrc.pas'. Searching the directory 'd:\src\SomeProject' with an exclude dirs filter of 'src' will actually find nothing at all because all names will start with 'd:\src' which always matches the filter! Did you know that? Is this a bug or a feature?

done

OK, since nobody bothered to reply, I assume that it won't matter if I change that feature to do what most people will assume it does: Only search sub-directories that do not match those given in the exclude dirs list.

I think that might be GExperts, in particular when using the GExperts code formatter. I have tried to find and fix this issue without any luck for many years.

I updated to 1909 from Windows 8.1 in December 2019. There were two issues that I remember, but these do not concern any recent Delphi versions: Updating to Windows 10 broke Delphi 6 and 2007 again Installing dotNet 2.0 on Windows 10 (The second was not an update issue but installing Delphi 2007 on a fresh Windows 10 installation.) This is why I blog about those issues. I keep forgetting them if I don't.

Basically C++ Builder in later versions is RAD Studio with a reduced feature set, so in theory it should work. Some experts are restricted to Delphi code (which as far as I know can also be compiled with C++ Builder). Since I don't program in C++ with RAD Studio, I don't know whether there are any problems. I haven't gotten any feedback from C++ programmers on that either. But it is easy to remove GExperts from RAD Studio if it causes any problems: Delete the GExperts entry from Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Embarcadero\BDS\20.0\Experts and it is gone. So, it is fairly safe to just try it.

When I see code like this I always wonder why the functions aren't called isBusy and isIdle rather than Busy and Idle. Prefixing them with "is" makes it clear that they will return a Boolean value.

The IFDEF editor expert was added to GExperts in 2016 and improved again in the same year, to support symbols defined in include files. Unfortunately sometimes an include file itself sometimes includes other files (e.g. jclNN.inc in the JEDI Code Library includes jedi.inc) which will usually add additional symbols which are then available for conditional compilation. But the IFDEF expert only listed symbols from the original include file. This has irked me for a long time, ... (read on in the blog post)