Larry Hengen

I have a TForm descendant that contains a scrollbox, and the form is nested within two panels on the main form of my application.  It displays values in a manner similar to the object inspector, and the user needs to be able to edit the values.  For some reason, I cannot focus the TLabeledEdit controls using the mouse left button click.  Right clicking on the control works and selects all text in the TEdit, but left click does not.  I see that a WM_SETFOCUS message is sent, but false is returned.  Before I start digging into the the VCL's message handling, I was wondering if anyone might know the cause of such behaviour, or have suggestions on how to best track it down.

I just converted the "inspector" form to a TFrame.  In doing so I loose some functionality like the ability to close the form, but I can now focus the edit control using the left mouse button, and I also get a right click local menu for the editor.  Is there anyway to make the embedded form behave in the same way as the frame with respect to embedded controls?

I just noticed in Rio 10.3.2 that the TFDSQLScript SQL editor has the Code Editor button in the String List Editor disabled.  I popped up the help and there does not seem to be a reason for this.  The SQL property is of type TSrings in the Inpsector and the actual implementation uses TFDStringList just the same as the connection Params ancestor class  in which you can use the Code Editor.  Is this a case of a missing property editor registration?

It would be very nice to be able to use the Code Editor to modify scripts instead of cop[y/pasting from an external editor.

I have also been using a variant of code from Jeroen W. Pluimers website.  I have incorporated it into the hcOPF project and added support for FMX.  The code credit contains the original blog post.

hcTemporaryCursor.pas

I have used Delphi in a VM  (VMWare Fusion) starting about 10 years ago.  I bought Fusion for my Mac Pro (an old 2.2Ghz Core2Duo).  Initially I had VMs on my laptop HD, but moved them to an external SSD drive formatted as HFS+.  I purchased Paragon's HFS+ support for Windows and shared the VM drive between my Mac Pro Laptop and my PC Desktop.  It worked pretty well, but I had to abandon it for one contract as soon as I started using the RAW Input API as that is not supported under VMWare.  I then bought an 3.0 Ghz AMD 6 core Win7 64 bit desktop and it screamed using XE2!  Still one of the fastest machines I have ever used Delphi on.

I used to use VMWare Fusion on my Mac Pro laptop until it died and I replaced it with a Mac Mini which is a little under powered for VMs.   Now I am using Ubuntu on my laptop (an old Toshiba Satellite L70-D) 4 core machine with 8Gb RAM, an SSD for the OS and a fast, large HD for the VirtualBox VMs.  Performance of 10.3.2 is good.  The re-drawing was painful with 10.3.1.  I am thinking about putting Ubuntu on my main desktop as well.  More cores and much more memory.  I am also no longer using VMWare, instead using VirtualBox 6 which seems pretty stable and performant.  I use the Host OS for Internet access (FireFox) and share folders from the host for code so I can switch VMs and still compile the same source.  This works well to experiment with Betas and other VM configurations, while not confusing things by having source code in each VM, potentially in a different location.  You can of course have VMs for specific clients so one Delphi configuration does not conflict with another. 

The only issue I have had to date is an occasional "lockup" where the VBox VM and the Ubuntu host machine have become unresponsive to the point I have had to power off my laptop.  I didn't have any data loss, and I think I narrowed this down to FireFox chewing all the RAM/CPU at some point.  Now I only have FireFox running when I need to, and have not had such a situation for a long time.  I am even considering switching to Chrome.

For me the flexibility of using VMs far outweighs the performance penalties.

Could this be your solution?

16 hours ago, Bill Meyer said:

Also keep in mind that they've told us for 20 years now that we don't understand marketing. Perhaps not -- I certainly do not understand THEIR marketing. But in my career I have learned a good deal about customer retention.

According to LinkedIn, his title is now: Mergers and Acquisitions Executive Advisor at Embarcadero Technologies.

And that does not seem to be marketing.

According to his LinkedIn profile (https://www.linkedin.com/in/miswindell/) he went from product marketing (3 years) to product management (remaining 8 years) at Borland.  Then 8 years of Product Management at EMBT and is now a consultant.  It almost sounds like he could have been the reason for Borland/EMBT's crappy marketing and therefore single handedly could have caused their decline while he rose in the ranks.  Perhaps he is the ONLY one who doesn't understand marketing...

Thanks all for the suggestions.  I am surprised one of these solutions has not been purchased or incorporated into the product by EMBT.

Please excuse the noob question as I'm sure it has been answered before, my google fu is just failing me.

Does the IDE have the ability to capture ADB logs in a window?  I have stumbled across a few external utilities to do so, one from an MVP in Japan and one from Kim Madsen but neither one seems to work with Rio.  The first one won't detect the attached device, and the second one throws an immediate error upon launch.  Using Android Studio for logcat is major overkill, and chews up all my resources.

Seems to me this is a pretty reasonable expectation of an IDE for a development target.

Any suggestions on working lightweight solutions?  I am using Rio 10.3.1

I am working on a project that was originally started using the Epina SDL Library TRChart component.  I am having  few issues with the component so I am wondering if anyone else is using it and can provide some tips.  The library seems fast and well written, but I don't want to have to debug their source code to figure out how to use it.

Anyone with experience using SDL?  Any recommendations for another charting library?  I would love something like ZedGraph for Delphi.

Contacted Yaroslav and he confirms beta should be this summer/autumn.

If this is true (and I have no reason to believe it is not), I would predict more piracy and illegitimate use of the community edition in EMBT's future as well as a downward trend in their customer base.  A lawsuit is also a possibility IMHO.

6 hours ago, Stefan Glienke said:

@Larry Hengen How many open source projects do you maintain? So speak for yourself

I maintain one on SourceForge and have several small Repos on GitHub and I do speak for only myself.  I can understand your viewpoint that anyone who cares about quality will accept a report from anywhere, but I feel that taking the time to report a bug shows a commitment on your part as a developer to quality.  It works both ways....the receiving developer and submitting developer should be bound by the same commitment to quality, otherwise all you're advocating is hypocrisy.  End users are another story, and it's a choice as to whether or not you want to chase down bugs reported on any medium depending on the quality of the information.

1 hour ago, Dalija Prasnikar said:

 

If you care about quality it does not really matter where the bug was reported. What matters is that people who need to know are aware of the bug.

I beg to differ.  If you already have time limitations (who doesn't) and are supporting an open source effort that benefits the community, adding the requirement that you collect, properly interpret, and enter bug reports on behalf of people already benefiting from your efforts is not only inconsiderate, but substantially reduces the time you have to fix the bugs.  Getting complete bug reports that are reproducible can be a challenge at the best of times so it requires a more structured approach to get the necessary information.  Requiring the user invest some time in providing a bug report reduces the number of unreproducible bugs, and ensures the reporter has some skin in the game in terms of getting a fix.

Heck, I don't even like it that EMBT doesn't have automatic bug report submissions to QP from the IDE when it throws and exception!

That is like me saying I won't create a BitBucket account to file a report for Spring4D.  How would you feel if people won't take the 2 minutes to sign up and file a report?

The TForm method GetFormImage might be what you are looking for.

It makes no sense to me, I just reviewed the edition matrix found at https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/product-editions.  The community edition has support for mobile platforms and MacOS, but not Linux. 

What makes MacOS different from Linux....oh yeah, the fact that it has desktop market share.  So you can develop a server process or a full GUI application for free for the Mac (albeit 32 bit right now), but you have to pay the big Buck$ to develop a server application for Linux, the one platform where developers tend to employ FOSS rather than commercial development tools.  If EMBT trusts that their community edition license works, why not include the Linux compiler in that edition?  At least then, developers who want to target linux can see how well the tool works and buy it when their project gets off the ground.  The community edition is meant to bring developers into the Delphi ecosystem.  Without GUI support, a limited number of Windows developers are going to target Linux, and without an entry level edition, no Linux developers are going to try it.

EMBT's Linux investment is probably minimal compared to other targets, like Mobile, yet the only way to try it out is with a trial edition.  If trial's worked so well then why did EMBT publish the community edition?

Delphi needs to provide a fully cross platform desktop solution or it will lose further market share to the likes of C# and it's community edition.

On 5/2/2019 at 12:09 AM, TigerLilly said:

Here you are:

https://www.tmssoftware.com/site/aureliusfree.asp

Thanks I didn't think that offer was valid any longer (it says it expired Feb. 2019) but it does apparently still work.  I downloaded a copy just in case Marshmellow proves to be unworkable.

Right now I am hesitant to ask for the purchase of commercial component unless it's absolutely necessary and I think Marshmellow will work for me.

I am looking for the best place to ask questions regarding Spring4D's persistence functionality known as Marshmellow.

I am starting a SQLLite3 project and would like to know how Spring4D maps the specified types in the Column attribute to SQLLite types.

I also have a lazily loaded list owned by another object, call it Parent.  When a Parent is created and saved to the database if I then try to add a Child object to the lazily loaded list, I get an error that: 'No delegate has been assigned'.  My code looks like the examples I see in the test projects.  What am I doing wrong?

I think that if you focus more on code organization, you will get more benefits, than from a tool.  That once in a blue moon brain fart that prevents a developer from remembering where the method is located, Grep Search works well and is lightning fast.  Why paid the price to parse the whole project every time you use Gexper'ts Procedure List?  Organize and document your code organization and it will become more intuitive to use IMHO.

Anyone using Marshmellow from the Spring4D project?  Looking for a low overhead ORM that I can use to load and manipulate thousands of PODOs with.  Any feedback would be appreciated.

WxForms used to be available as a form designer for earlier versions of Delphi but seems to be discontinued.  I am curious if anyone is using any other UI framework  (other than FMX) for XPlatform apps from Delphi and could make some recommendations based on their experiences.

On 4/8/2019 at 1:15 PM, AlekXL said:

And opensourcing the compiler does not mean EMBT loses it's exclusive copyright. Learn to read

I can read English just fine thank you.  I didn't mention anything about copyright.  That is a completely different issue as you likely know.  Copyright is hard and costly to enforce, especially so in nations which to not subscribe to the legal concept or enforce it, such as China.  Open sourcing the compiler would be tantamount to giving away the IP.

On 4/8/2019 at 11:40 AM, Joseph MItzen said:

Isn't the core really the framework?

No the core is the compiler(s) without which they could not compile the IDE (back when it was Pure Pascal), or the VCL/FMX code.  Yes the VCL is also a large piece of intellectual property that anchors developers to the platform.  Unfortunately, FMX dies not seem to be as ubiquitous as the VCL.  Perhaps open sourcing that framework would be a catalyst to building a bigger community of third party vendors and developers and keeping pace with all the platforms as they change, but that is another topic.

Open sourcing the compiler(s) will never happen.  That is the core of EMBT's intellectual property, and one of the major reasons why Lazarus/FPC has not eroded the Delphi market further than it has; compiler compatibility.  There is no money in writing an IDE and there are lots of them freely available.  EMBT's revenue is from developers who have lots of source code which is tied to the Delphi compilers. 

The IDE makes for most of the development experience, so I think you would have more chance of getting the IDE Core open sourced (like Visual Studio shell) than getting the compiler open sourced.  Many developers could competently work on the IDE to improve it, make it portable (xPlatform) etc, but not many developers could contribute to the compilers, IMHO.

Yes because quality central is now defunct.  It is recommended you save the report and manually create a JIRA issue and attach the report there.  Just another way to prevent more bug reports IMHO.