[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] In replying to a comment on his blog post about the pricing of the mobile add-on pack (XE4 – no news on XE5 as yet that I am aware of), Larry Hengen appears to be one of those people still under the belief that there are any “new buyer” type customers for Delphi. Are there ? Really ?
[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] The word is out. XE5 will be coming this September, as described in the announcement of a tour of Russia to promote the new release.
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] I am preparing a post inspired by my recent travels to Ukraine and the United Kingdom, but in the meantime I couldn’t help but smile (ok, “smirk”) when following a link to an Embarcadero page entitled “Delphi for iOS Kick Start”, that appeared in the DelphiFeeds, um, feed.
[Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes] Having installed and activated Delphi XE4 using the license available to me from my employer I decided that, despite the very nasty taste left in my mouth, I would pay the $49 required for the XE4 “hot-fix” release, albeit only in order to remain with the valid update window now imposed by Embarcadero, on the off-chance that one of the next two releases might actually be worthwhile. This uncovered something of an ironic problem.
[Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes] Yesterday I found myself having to write some code that would never be used in order to co-erce the compiler into not complaining that something would not be used when in fact it was.
[Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes] In the previous post in this series, we saw that the number of threads that a given process could support was determined by a number of factors, of which the stack size reserved for each thread was key. We also saw how we could change the stack size used by our application and how this could increase the number of threads that our process could support. But if you thought it seemed a bit crude to have to set a single stack size for all the threads in a process (including the main thread), then you would be right, and we can do something about this.
[Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes] Roberto Schneiders recently drew my attention to the first post on his new blog (which I can recommend as a good read 🙂 ), presenting the results of some performance testing of DataSnap that he had been involved with which proved to be very interesting (if initially somewhat disappointing). But my post isn’t about that, at least not directly.
[Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes] The ever evolving DWScript project continues to advance the Pascal language at an impressive pace. Just today it was announced that this scripting version of Pascal now has “namespace” support.
[Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes] In putting some finishing polish on the GUI console of my Smoketest framework (see, I am working on it!) I ran into something that I remember I once knew and – seemingly – had forgotten, about mixing API level access to a GDI device context with the high-level TCanvas access that is conveniently provided for us.
[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] In his most recent post, Chris Rolliston points out a gotcha resulting from a change in the VCL with XE3. The post itself is quite interesting and makes some valid and significant observations. However, in the follow up comments Chris makes the observation that the old code was lazy, relied on a compiler detail and should have been “properly” re-written, rather than replacing reliance on one compiler detail with another. I think it is worth highlighting that Chris’ observations here are – I believe – directed at the use of untyped pointers and dynamic arrays, not the use of the pointer exposed by the TList class itself, as the two things could easily be conflated when reading Chris’ post and the QC issue it refers to.
