David Schwartz

We pay so-called "maintenance" fees to supposedly get bugs fixed. But when the maintenance runs out and then they say you need to renew it to get bugs fixed in the version you already paid for, it's unethical. It makes the so-called "maintanance plan" nothing more than an annual license fee. 10.4.2 is reasonsbly nice but we should get a 10.4.3 that fixes the bugs introduced in 10.4.2, not forced to renew and then have to get D11 instead. If I don't feel like upgrading for a couple of releases, that's ok, it costs the same either way. Since inline vars were introduced in 10.x, the refactoring stopped being useful. In 10.4.2, still not useful. But other new features were added. And in 10.4.2, when I use debug inspector and adjust width or the column splitter in the popup form, Delphi hangs. All you can do is kill it in Task Manager and restart it. This happens at least 50% of the time when I inspect variables while debugging. This should have been fixed a week after 10.4.2 shipped. Nope. I guess the problems with the web server stuff that only a fraction of customers use are more important than the debugger that freezes the IDE that everybody uses. PRIORITIES.... I also have a regular problem when looking at stringlists using the stringlist viewer. It throws repeated exceptions (via MadExcept) about some issue with a Boolean, and reloads the viewer many, many times. You have to close the exception box each time, and sometimes it just recurses so many times it's easier to just kill delphi and restart it. But other stuff was fixed with patches. This crap was released under a maintenance plan. It should be fixed in a 10.4.x update, not requiring people to move to a newer version for resolution subject to renewal of the maintenance plan. I honestly don't want to move to D11 at this time. Just more new bugs to deal with. I WANT STABILITY! I'm really tired of every new release fixing some old bugs that should have been fixed before, then adding new stuff and more bugs. We NEVER get to a point of STABILITY with ANY release!!! What we can count on is that there will be a major new release every fall that will stop the previous version dead in its tracks and force you to upgrade whether you want to or not just to get older bugs fixed. If you have an end-of-the-line update before a new release (eg, 10.4.2), another one should be released to everybody that fixes outstanding bugs that makes it stable without requiring you upgrade to the next version. Customers paying for "maintenance" deserve a STABLE UPDATE at the end of a line before upgrading to a whole new release.

That's why I said "(or 'n')"... So, knowing that 'n' <= #cores, you can limit how many active tasks or threads there are to 'n', right? I would think the easiest way to do that is to set the size of the thread pool to 'n'. (Sorry if that's too obvious.)

I was trying to get him to figure that out himself....

I haven't looked at the code, but is there anything special about the DHTML components that's required? TMS has a new lib, TMS FNC WX PACK, that includes TTMSFNCWXHTMLMemo (among other things). If I had to guess, you might be using the Observables to act as setters / getters for the HTML tags. The TMS FNC components are universal components and work in all platforms that Delphi supports. Specifically in this case, they work in WebCore (and WebCore VSC), which translates Delphi into javascript. You can get access to the js in several ways at the Delphi level. I think an interface library that works in WebCore and uses TTMSFNCWXHTMLMemo would be fairly easy to write. As for a regular VCL Delphi app ... not sure.

How do you know there are exactly 8 (or 'n') CPUs?

I've got a couple hundred pages of PDF files in many documents and someone said they need me to put some ID numbers in the footer or a margin of every page. Ugh. I don't have Acrobat and I'm not going to buy it just for this. I've also used several PDF libs and I know they can be used, but again, they cost about what Acrobat costs. (I don't have access to any of them myself.) Is there a simple PDF library for Delphi that I can use to put a small rectangle with a string in it onto every page in the same location on each one? Kinda like printing a bunch of stickers and then putting them on each page in the same place (eg., vertically in the left margin)

the paperwork can be submitted via FAX or printed and sent via snail mail. FAX is easier. My sister solved the problem with NitroPDF and combined all of the documents into a single large document, then added a header in the top margin with the required info.

No. It's a bunch of paperwork the bank wants that's already in PDF files, including a few years of tax returns. They want an ID printed on every page of every PDF, then FAXed to them All the same info on every page in the same place. I wonder how long it will be before banks move their data systems into the 21st Century?

RzBalloonHints isn't working for me. It just shows a yellowish rectangle instead of a balloon regardless of the ShowBalloon property setting. Can anybody working with the Raize Components (whatever they're called now) verify if this works for you or not? (I've got D10.4.2 with the latest V7.0.0 components installed. Haven't had trouble with any others, just noticed this one is behaving oddly.)

what's the image list for?

that works, but it's not nearly as nice as the Raize one. It's just the same rectangle with a tiny little "thumb" pointing down and to the left. And I have to put one on every form.

nope. I read the help page and didn't notice that. The Raize one does it automatically. I'll give it a try.

Yup, TRzBalloonHints is what I meant. I changed the post, but can't change the title. I didn't notice a TBalloonHint component. I'll check it out. ---------------- Nope, that displays the hints exactly the same as if it's not there. I have no style set up or anything that should be affecting these components.

I want a simple form with a button that lets me switch the internet connection on and off. Is there an API call for that? I've got Windows 10 and I HATE IT!!! No matter what I tell it as far as not updating stuff, it just goes along its own merry way and is constantly downloading crap and then telling me, "Oh, sorry, we need to reboot. Back soon! Bye!" I don't use the internet that much, and it's running inside of a VM anyway, so I figure I'll just turn on the ethernet port when I need to reach out, then turn it off when I'm done to keep Gates, er ... gated.

If you consider "2 weeks" as "old". It's constantly updating itself, I can't see how it can be "old". I don't use it every day but it seems to want to restart every couple of weeks. This is the virus calld "MSWindows10" that never sleeps for more than 10 minutes. It's my own copy running in a VM. It's isolated from everything, and if it blows up I just restore it from backup. I don't want no stink'n updates! They tend to screw things up while doing absolutely nothing to make my work any better. There are no corporate policies at work here. But the past few places I've worked who provided me with laptops rebooted weekly, sometimes multiple times a week, installing stuff. I never had a say in any of that. This one's mine, and I don't like that it's constantly doing stuff without telling me what's going on. Windows 7 rarely did this. I'm a developer, and I don't like having maintenance done on the building while I'm working in it just because someone somewhere reported a problem in a similar building. There are enough instablities in Delphi! I don't need OS stuff getting replaced that leads to other problems that sideline me for hours tracking them down. Edition Windows 10 Pro Version 20H2 Installed on ‎10/‎14/‎2021 OS build 19042.1288 Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.3920.0

Yes, that's what I want -- to be able to run stuff like this manually.

I finally figured out how to shut off the auto-updates. It requires you to make changes to the system policies. So I don't have to shut off the internet connection to prevent it from downloading stuff automatically any more. Now I'd just like to know how to tell Windows 10 to stop doing undisclosed background processing after some amount of idle time. Maybe that's another system policy that needs to be edited... (It seems if you don't do anything for 10 minutes or so, it starts doing some housekeeping activities. It suddenly starts chewing up a bunch of CPU time which makes my computer fan start hissing, like a tea kettle coming to a boil.)

Why is this thread under "Windows API" instead of the one that deals with REST and other web services?

I believe the line is drawn at D2010 because that's when generics were introduced into the language. Due to bugs, some stuff won't work before XE4 or so.

I've got a situation where I have a bunch of combo-boxes where the user can define conditions for rules that are applied to set attributes on a big grid of "buttons" that are used to display the state of different things. (Sort of like if you had a grid and each row has combo-boxes to select what goes in a cell. But in this case, there's a row of them at the top and data is read / saved from / to a selected row in the grid.) There are a half-dozen combo-boxes, a few edits (for literals), and a couple of check-boxes for options. The user selects the factors he wants for a rule, then saves it to the grid. (Actually, I'm using a ListView in this case.) This is a "rule editor". At "run-time", we get some data in and it gets processed by going through each row in the list and applying all of the rules to set how each button looks. There's one record per button. I created an interpreter that loads up groups of rules and processes them for each record. Given that Delphi doesn't support the use of strings as discrimanents in Case statements, what do folks do to deal with this? I've seen a dozen or so approaches over time. But in this case, I'm looking for a solution that's best suited for rapidly going through a list of rules for each incoming record. It's sort of like a table-driven parser in that respect. You need to have a map to get from the list of strings to associated integers, then use the integer values in the Case statement. In my first approach, I made the mistake of tying everything to the UI components. They're used to create and edit the rules. But when processing the data, loading each rule into the UI elements is completely unnecessary since the user isn't interested, and there's really nothing to see. I want them to simply click a button and a form pops up with a grid and all of the buttons have what they want displayed on them. The nice thing about using the combo-boxes is that you can use the ItemIndex property instead of the string in the Text property. That is, the mapping is built-in. Ideally, what I'd like is something like the syntax that the awk language offers, which sort of like a Case statement where you get a string and it falls-through a list of regular expressions. Each one that matches runs a block of code next to it. Maybe there's an interesting way of compensating for the inability to use strings with Case statements that I'm not aware of. Right now I've just got a bunch of Case statements that use a stringlist to map strings to integers. But if I change the list, I have to re-number the lines in the Case statement. Grrrrr (Yes, I know it's best to add things at the end, but I'd prefer to have things either sorted alphabetically or organized in semi-related sub-groups. I don't like having the damn programming language impose restrictions on how things appear to users!) As I think about it, what might be best is something that lets me add items to a list with a string (key) and an anonymous method that does something when that key is found, corresponding to what a string-based Case statement might do, or even what awk lines do (just more verbose).

What is HCL? Is there a button or graphic that I can display things on and format the BG color, Font attributes, display text, some smileys, etc?

sort of, but Delphi doesn't support CSS in forms. I know there are some components that support HTML, but ... CSS?

Thanks, I'll give that a try.

My last job I built a tool that integrated git into our workflow. Boy did it save a ton of errors and ensured we all did things the same way. It was a kind of "dashboard" that I did my work through. I also integrated a bunch of things that I found myself doing very regularly in my daily tasks. They were all very specific to the work we did, but it was extremely repetitive and automating parts of it made a huge difference. But the biggest benefit was with git, for sure.

I use both approaches. Some bits of code let you take a fairly piecemeal approach, like what you describe. Others require quite a bit of code to be written before you can do much of anything. In the latter situations, I'll often do compiles just to look for typos and missing declarations, but 10.4.2 is quite good at highlighting various things with background parsing. Getting "clean code" that compiles is one thing. Making sure it does what it's supposed to is something else. Sometimes I'll build just enough UI scaffolding to let me play with bits of code as it evolves, but I'm not a fan of "Design for Test" so I don't make independent tests. UI-driven stuff either does what you want or it doesn't. I don't see the need for separate test code. The vast majority of what I do is UI-driven, so I don't even bother with unit tests. They are best for libraries. (I've often wished there was a way to add meta-methods to classes, like test meta-methods that you could add for testing. But often they need to be run at a higher level. Sometimes it makes sense to have integrity tests that check to ensure certain combinations of data members are provided and that nothing is out-of-range, but they'd still be called by higher-level functions. TForms for data entry use let you do this a little with Validate methods.) That said, I'll frequently add treeviews or listviews or memos to let me visualize results as I'm adding things. And sometimes things don't look as nice as I originally thought, so I'll change them.