Brandon Staggs

Some of my stuff is in the QA portal (menu fixes I think) and I still have to use it despite the reports being marked "fixed." But most of my workarounds are done on-the-fly with my own inherited form and frame classes and would be too much bother for me to pull out to show anybody. I guess if I were to share a "feel" for how it's going, I'd say it's getting better. I think Embarcadero should force their developers to use their own IDE in a mixed-DPI environment in various configurations and not stop fixing scaling issues until they can do everything seamlessly. Who knows, maybe they already have, and they just aren't exposing the problems I run into.

The irony for me is that I have been so frustrated with the inadequacies of VCL multi-monitor-DPI support than I have long since solved all of the issues myself, and every time Embarcadero tries to improve their support, they break my fixes. So, maybe a bit selfishly, I hope they stop messing with it! Just kidding, this is definitely an area they still need to improve.

With a boot time of up to 7 minutes, and all those other caveats listed, I guess the purpose of this is to make it "easier" to get some data off the VM? Definitely wouldn't want to use that daily in production!

This is the way.

It does work. I can't suggest what is wrong with your configuration, but you can definitely expect it to work -- we have it in production for a few years now with no issues.

False. I'm not disagreeing that the IDE should be 64-bit by now, but there are still major applications that need to build 32-bit targets. But all that means is that we still need 32-bit compilers, it has nothing to do with the bitness of the IDE.

Just like he "publicly stated" that 640k would always be enough memory, right? Actually, there is no evidence of either statement. The 640k thing is directly disputed by Gates and nobody has any direct source for the statement. Internal memos at MS disagree with the latter "quote" ( https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/26/how-bill-gates-described-the-internet-tidal-wave-in-1995.html ) I have no love for Gates, but people should stop perpetrating those myths, as it is unjust to attribute statements to people with no actual evidence they ever said something. As to the other stuff, MS-DOS and Windows did not need to focus on high-powered shell programmability. It seems obvious to me that their target audience was not Unix gurus. Be that as it may, that is all ancient history and you can use full *nix shells on Windows now if you want to. What I don't really understand is why anyone who dislikes Windows so much would willingly become a Delphi developer. Delphi started as a Windows development tool and that is still its strength.

That is simply incorrect. My ARM64 (Snapdragon) Windows laptop runs 32-bit x86 code just fine. Delphi is still a 32-bit IDE. They have 64-bit compilers now if you want to pay for an Enterprise license but the rest of us are slumming it in 32-bits and that's not a problem for ARM-based Windows.

Your VM does not have the correct operating system installed on it for that to work. It's the responsibility of the installed Windows OS on the VM to translate x86/x64 code to ARM instructions. Your version of Windows won't do that.

I use Help & Manual. For deployed help file I use their e-reader format which is basically an executable wrapper around the Trident web control that exposes the help html. I also deploy PDFs and web-based help with it. I think it checks all the boxes on your list. Check it out. I think Microsoft really dropped the ball on integrated help. It used to be so easy and straightforward just using CHM.

Not just you. Regardless of the variable state at the end of the for loop, a while or repeat loop would be far more clear IMO.

A clipboard history is a convenient way to see lots of passwords in plaintext. Who wouldn't love that.

No, but because Windows machines cost so much less for substantially the same thing. The fact that I build my own machines is not really the point; I don't believe most Windows machines are dead in 3-5 years, that's ridiculous. Nearly everyone I work with is using Windows machines at least that old. If you prefer MacOS that's certainly fine, nobody can criticize you for that. My personal experience as someone actively doing development for Macs is that it is easily the worst system to target for development and gets worse with every major update. Although it may be a lot of Unix under the hood, Apple is locking it down more and more with every update. Apple behaves as if it owns not only its hardware but their users. The Apple Tax is not just overpaying for hardware, but losing personal computer sovereignty with every update. It's bad enough on Windows, it's many times worse on Mac.

One of the supposed benefits to an EV cert is that it comes with instant SmartScreen rep. My own experience was than the first time I signed with my EV cert nobody saw any SmartScreen warnings, which was never the case when I first used cheaper certs in the past. Do different browsers use their own screening systems? Windows + Edge should be consistent, but maybe other browsers don't care what SmartScreen thinks?

Sounds like a very poor choice of computers, then. I have like four or five Windows PCs in my house all being used that are 5 or more years old. But, I did build them myself. The cost of Mac computers is outrageous. I am forced to buy them for development work, but unless you are or want to be in the Mac ecosystem, the prices are just too high. This is par for the course with Apple products since the 80s, they have always been overpriced but catering to a subset of the population that buys into their marketing. I will say that modern Mac computers are almost works of art from a hardware standpoint and I guess I understand that for some people this justifies the price, and for others MacOS is better suited to them and you can only legally use their OS on their devices, so.