Dave Novo

We have been using Delphi in a VMWare Workstation for over a decade. We have a team of about 12 people. Some remote workers use Delphi in a Citrix instance run on our XenDesktop environment. A decade ago, there were lots of problems. Windows activation issues. Delphi activation issues. etc. But we stuck with it because it ensured all team members have an identical instance set up appropriately. Also, if one computer crapped out, we were up and running within 20 minutes. These days, its a no brainer. We dont even have Delphi installed directly on the host machines any longer, so I cannot compare to a host installation on the same machine, but running in the VM is more than acceptable. All benchmarks we have run (i.e. running same executable inside vm and on real machine) are within 95% speed of each other. For profiling, we dont even both copying to the host machine any longer, unless we are profiling heavy multi-threaded work. What does make a big difference is to put the VM on an SSD. Compile times are much faster. Our App is about 2 million LOC, but we ensure that our individual units are not too large. Usually a few K LOC, up to a max of 20K LOC or so. CTRL+END is pretty instant for me, even in the largest units. Maybe we would get 1/2 sec better on some mouse actions if we installed it on the desktop, who knows, but I personally do not notice any speed impediment due the to the VM. My typing speed is usually the bottleneck, not the IDE (and I type pretty fast).

I have never tried it, but I know this exists https://www.winsoft.sk/doffice.htm

Hello, When signing a PDF, you can use a proper digital signature. Note in the attached screenshot, you can use a certificate from the System or from a file. You can even create new certificates etc. Are there any third party components that handle the details of this, i.e. reading/validating the certificates. I want my users to be able to sign the documents that my application makes. We have a basic digital signature system already, but not one that supports certificates etc.

HI Emil, I do not want to sign a PDF however. I want to be able to implement signing on my own custom documents. But still using a "industry standard" signing mechanism.

I want to implement the same standard (ideally) that Adobe PDF implements. It seems there are a few standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAdES https://www.cloudsignatureconsortium.org/ Seems like there are already "trusted" companies that can generate the signing certificates in the proper way, and also you can create your own certificates somehow. I dont know all the technical details of how this works though, I was hoping that someone already implemented it.

In as much as if you saw my signature on any piece of paper, like credit card receipt, then stole my checkbook, then scanned both together and issued forged checks, you could try to do so I guess. This somehow embeds a real certificate of some sort into your document. Here is a bit of an overview of what they are doing, but it is light on technical details https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/11/using/digital-ids.html I think there is an open standard that governs these kinds of digital signatures.