dummzeuch

Can somebody explain to me what TForm.Action is for? And how it can be used? The OLH is here, but it does not specifically talk about TForm: http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Rio/en/Vcl.Forms.TForm.Action It refers to an example http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/CodeExamples/Rio/en/TFormAction_(Delphi) which I also don't understand. From the example I gather that TForm.Action is not assigned by default, but when and by which mechanism is it executed? It's not that I need it, I just came across this property for the first time (it has existed for over a decade).

I'm not questioning the advantages of actions in general, just that of an action property in TForm. I still haven't understood what that particular one can be used for.

So, the Action is executed when the user clicks on the form?

Make the browser window narrower and it disappears altogether. Then you have to use the menu. Not really an improvement.

"Diesmal funktioniert alles" The last line from "Computer sind doof" by Spliff I don't think there is an English translation of the lyrics or sub titles for this song, sorry. It basically tells about lots of things going wrong when using computers (actually embedded microprocessors, what nowadays would part of the "Internet of things"). Mostly just annoyances. The last part then describes a sequence of computer failure events that leads to the death of Leonid Breschnew and him causing a nuclear war. The last sentence then is "This time everything works."

I have been bitten by methods changing a given record multiple times: Some examples are * changing a const parameter * a property no longer changing its value after adding a getter method for it (boy was that one hard to track down) Nowadays I try to avoid them, but sometimes they are just too convenient...

The IDE's Search -> Go to Line Number dialog contains a drop down which apparently remembers the last used line numbers, so the user can re-select them. I don't remember ever using this feature. Does anybody else?

You mean "doing something with computers" is useful? If you really wanted to learn something useful, you should have learned gardening, masonry or carpentry. 😉

I'm sure we all feel with you. Everybody has been there at some time. So enjoy your Scotch. 😉

Unfortunately it supports only Delphi 2010 and later. (Yes, I know, it's my own fault that I still use Delphi 2007, but that doesn't change the fact.)

TFormatSettings.ListSeparator is supposed to return the character the user has configured in the Windows configuration dialog: This works fine if it only contains a single character, which at least the possible selections for English (UK / US) and German (Germany) actually are: ';' and ','. But this dialog also allows to enter any string as the list separator, e.g. 'asdf' which will cause TFormatSettings.ListSeparator to return ','. The reason is that it gets filled calling GetLocaleInfo with a buffer size of 2 (in Chars) which will return 0 because the buffer is too small: function GetLocaleChar(Locale, LocaleType: Integer; Default: Char): Char; var Buffer: array[0..1] of Char; begin if GetLocaleInfo(Locale, LocaleType, Buffer, 2) > 0 then Result := Buffer[0] else Result := Default; end; This will then set Result to the Default parameter (which is ','). Is this a bug or a documented feature? I couldn't find any documentation on it. If it's a bug, of course the question is, what should it do instead? Since TFormatSettings.ListSeparator is a Char, it cannot return more than one characters. Are there any locales where a list separator with more than one character is commonly used? E.g. Chinese ? (I always suspect the Chinese to do something unexpected. 😉 )

Nobody seems to have mentioned watches yet. If you want to keep a eye on a value at various places, a watch is the way to go.

Actually Delphi has WriteLn which does exactly what Python's print does (for simple types, no idea whether Python's print can handle complex types) Unfortuntately WriteLn writes to the console which usually doesn't exist in GUI programs so it will result in an exception.

As far as I remember these popularity curves are percentages of all programmers, so if the total number of programmers rises and the number of programmers that use <language> stays constant, the popularity curve for <language> falls.

Do Delphi inline variable declarations actually work by now? I remember various bug reports on them and decided not to use them until that code is stable. And then I forgot about them...

I think that window uses TVirtualTreeview which would make it nearly impossible to read it's content and modify it with a plugin, unless there is an OTAPI interface for it. But this is guesswork, I haven't really checked either.

https://blog.dummzeuch.de

Given how many developers have got problems understanding how a distributed version control system works, I doubt that non technical people will understand it. And given how many times I personally had problems resolving git oddities (probably due to my own limited understanding of it), I doubt that you will do yourself a favor implementing this with git. This will most likely become a support nightmare, especially in my experience with the attitude of sales people towards IT and software developers. (They regard them lower than plumbers because in contrast to sales who earn the company lots of money IT only costs the company money and gets always into the way.)

Those people could always disable that warning for code where they don't want to see it. Not having such a warning means that the rest of us doesn't get the benefit.

Yes, please do that. I always find it difficult to generate example files to reproduce problems with other languages, especially those I don't understand.

I wonder whether archive.org also caches the downloads. There are various posts on blogs, forums and newsgroups that point to code central downloads. They will not go away but will be useless in the future. So far it was possible to find the download if you simply knew the cc number, even if it still pointed to cc.borland.com. In the future that might no longer work. Tested it: It's even worse: codecentral.embarcadero.com seems not to be in the Internet Archive at all. That also applies to the very first entry which Jim mentions in his blog: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://codecentral.embarcadero.com/Item/2 Great, so the complete legacy will be lost to posterity. What am I going to show my (non existent, we have not even kids) grand grand children when they ask me "Grampa, WTF is this Delphi thing you keep mumbling about? The web knows nothing about it! Are you finally losing it?"

The current source now compiles again with all supported Delphi versions.

Put the cursor within the class and press Ctrl+Space. This will give you a list of all interface methods. Iirc this also supports multi select. Unfortunately the method declarations will always be added as public which is usually not what you want.

I won't hold my breath either. The interesting part is that it took several years until somebody noticed that the expert does no longer work in some circumstances and wrote a bug report for GExperts. I didn't notice it myself, but that's not surprising given that most of my work is still with Delphi 2007 and doesn't involve databases. I was thinking about a workaround by closing the form and manipulating the dfm and pas file directly. But so far I haven't bothered.

It says so right in the release blog post: "Since Delphi XE3 and later no longer allow creating components with subcomponents (the OTAPI function for that crashes – bug report here), GExperts no longer supports these components in the Replace Components expert." The link goes to: https://quality.embarcadero.com/browse/RSP-25645