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Darian Miller

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Posts posted by Darian Miller

  2. Posted

    The winnner was announced - https://ideasawakened.com/post/rad-programmer-challenge-number-one-winner-announcement

    Jaques Nascimento

     

    Congrats!  A serial number for a free license of Pascal Expert from Peganza was emailed earlier today and am currently arranging his $500 prize delivery for his Minesweeper build in RAD Studio.

     

    There were 18 contestants with a variety of game features implemented.   Two of the games are available on the Google Play store and one user made a video tutorial of his build:

    - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=br.com.imperium.MineSweeper

    - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.abrito.Minesweeper

    - 

     

     

     

    I hope it was fun for those involved!  I am writing up the next one to hopefully start soon.

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 2

  3. Posted

    There were 17 contestants who built their own version of MineSweeper in RAD Studio.  View their GitHub repos with this GitHub topic search:

    https://github.com/topics/radprogrammer-challenge1

     

    Have you given them a star on GitHub yet for their efforts?   So far, the one with the most stars has 38.   The winner will be announced this week and a new challenge to begin.

     

    If you are a third-party tool vendor, and would like to contribute a free license or a discount as part of the prize pool in the next challenge, please reach out to me.  

     

  5. Posted

    15 hours ago, dwrbudr said:

    there are still cases where VCL Style Utils helps.

     

    Is there a resource that lists exactly what VCL Style Utils improves in 12.3?  It sounds like a good idea to use it, but I don't know what it does exactly for each version without tearing through the code.

  7. Posted

    57 minutes ago, Anders Melander said: 
    
type
  TClass = class(TObject)
  private
    FSomeField: integer;
  private const 
    SomeConstant = 5;
  private type
    SomeType = integer;
  private class var
    SomeClassVar: integer;
  end;

    etc. etc.

     

    My preference would be similar, but I'd start with private const and end with private fields.

     

     

    • Like 1

  8. Posted

    I believe many people prefer native desktop applications to the typical bloat of a web application.  There are some exceptions, and I am an older guy with heavy bias, but I would pay double for a native desktop application over a browser based application for just about anything.

    If I wanted to use it on my phone, I'd take a scaled down version, targeted with features needed to be available on-the-go.

     

    • Like 4
    • Thanks 2

  11. Posted

    9 hours ago, Patrick PREMARTIN said:

    Nobody contacted you for this little contest ? 😞

    There was a couple questions asked, but I haven't heard much.  We'll see how many end up submiting a game.  Maybe Marco's 25 year old game will win.  🙂

     

    I plan on doing at least a few of these if there is some participation.  These are some ideas for future projects - I welcome any suggestions:

    - AI ChatBot is the next-up

    - Specific GitHub build actions to help automate CI tasks for Delphi

    - VS Code add-ons

    - Perhaps a couple NVidia-CUDA library focused projects - Game Dev, AI, HPC, Video/Image Processing

    - Debug Visualizers of various types and other ToolsAPI based projects

    - Cross Platform Logging Framework  (there's a few good ones already)

     

    I have some more surprises that I've been working on.  One project turned out to be much, much bigger than I thought.  We'll see what happens.  I want to generate more traffic on social media and GitHub.  In general, it seems like Delphi devs are way too quiet online.  Yes, there are probably a lot fewer Delphi developers than we hope for, but I know the majority out there aren't actively increasing the visibility of Delphi online.   Maybe we are just mostly old-farts who play solitaire on our computer in our off-times...  More likely is we're busy at work and don't have time for vibe coding nonsense.  🙂

     

  15. Posted

    41 minutes ago, Brandon Staggs said:

    they have also said during the release webinar that they are aware LSP doesn't work acceptably and will be replacing the current system with a completely new approach in 13

    I don't recall hearing that..    that sounds ominous to me.  I wonder how long will it take to fix the completely new approach.  But it's obvious the current approach isn't working as it's still pretty flaky after 5 years of trying.

  17. Posted

    AI chat is another tool in your toolbox that you can use, or choose not to.  From my informal testing, the "best" right now for Delphi seems to be https://claude.ai/

     

    I think we're nearing a point where local/private LLMs will become much more powerful and affordable.. you will train your AI tooling on your entire codebase, your help files, complete ticket system history, and specific industry knowledge sets so your LLM will be much more contextual.   The companies that leverage this highly customized tooling may have an distinct advantage over those than do not.  It's still going to be hard to beat the creative genius of a motivated mind, but even as those brand new ideas come to market, eventually the same leverage will be used to saturate the market quicker (so the large coprorations will eat up the small ones faster than they already do.)

     

    On the other hand, large corporations will continue to waste so much valuable time on micro-managing the creative types leaving gaps open for their eventual downfall.  (Wishful thinking given the gigantic cash reserves of large corporations today.)

  18. Posted · Edited by Darian Miller

    One step further... I worked with a Delphi developer who rarely used Free, and tried to only use Destroy.  Everyone seems to have an opinion on Free vs FreeAndNil but he was the only one that ever went further and said Destroy vs Free.  Some of the same arguments could be had for using Destroy vs Free.  (But I still use .Free)

  19. Posted

    It is very likely that whatever decision you make now, you will adjust as you get more experience.  This is a topic without a true correct answer... it simply depends.  

     

    If you want to be strict and always follow a single rule - then use FreeAndNill all the time.  After a while, you will wonder why you are doing that and you can revisit after you have some code in place.

     

    For me, I only rarely use FreeAndNil - only when it is part of the normal logic that instance again could/will be read in the future and that I will need to know it's correct state.  (For example, treat nil as a special 'done' or 'not yet started' type flag.)

    • Like 1

  23. Posted

    On 1/16/2025 at 12:21 PM, Brandon Staggs said:

    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.

    Hopefully your fix count going down over time.  What's your feeling there...is it getting slowly better?  Have you published your latest fixes anywhere?

  24. Posted

    On 1/2/2025 at 10:54 AM, Jason Nelson said:

    64-bit IDE.... like NOBODY builds 32-bit apps anymore... unless you're a complete noob.

     

    +1 for 32-bit apps in a global commercial environment that is a very long way away from deprecating 32-bit applications.  Just think of how many developers are still using Delphi 7 on a daily basis.   There are still major Turbo Pascal line-of-business applications being supported.

     

    Put that up there with IP4 being completely replaced very soon, or this is finally "The Year of Desktop on Linux", or the WEF will peacefully achieve its global governance goals and the world's citizens will all be happy.

     

  25. Posted

    On 4/17/2020 at 3:32 PM, Jacek Laskowski said:

    Unfortunatelly I don't.

     

    When it comes to the order of starting the "initialization" section it's not always the same, it all depends on the uses section, in my case your code is launched before RTL/VCL threads.
    I bypassed this problem by adding a anonymous thread with delay:

     

    I was playing with a little threading project tonight and I did a quick update on this unit to add a delay similar to what you suggested.   (Now also call Get/SetThreadDescription if available)

    https://github.com/ideasawakened/iaLib/blob/master/Source/iaRTL.NameDelphiThreads.Windows.pas

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