Cygnes' Weblog - delphi programming

Vista Network File Copying

drastic@pandora.be (Robin van Nooij) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 07:55:00 +0000

I'm using CruiseControl.net for my auto build environment. One part of the build is copying my release to a network server. The bad part about this is that my build is taking ages, just because of the slow Vista file copying. 2 MB file is taking more than 2 minutes to copy. Copying is taking more time than building the whole project. So I really needed a faster method to copy my files. I tried RoboCopy, copy and xcopy. They are all slow, so I decided to write a simple delphi console application that copies a file to a destination path. Guess what, instead of 2 minutes it takes less than 2 seconds, so beat this Vista. All I used is a TFileStream for input and a TFileStream from output. Geez, that's all it took.

Go Delphi! You made my day, again!

My employer is looking for Delphi and C# developers

drastic@pandora.be (Robin van Nooij) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 19:22:00 +0000

Hey developers,

looking for a developer job in Belgium. Good news! my employer has some job offerings.

More info about the job can be found here:

www.vacature.com (dutch)

For more information you can contact Tom De Decker at Aucxis trading Solutions

Maybe we'll be colleagues in the near future.

Delphi 2007 - File Browser expert

drastic@pandora.be (Robin van Nooij) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:48:00 +0000

We finally started using Codegear Delphi 2007 (Update 3) at work. It's a big step forward since we were using Delphi 7. First impressions are very good. I noticed the new file browser. This browser is like windows explorer docked into the IDE. One useful feature is that you can use all explorer shell extensions. For instance TortoiseSVN is a very important one since I'm using it daily for versioning. The file browser misses clearly one important feature, synchronizing with the active project. I always have to scroll to the project directory to do anything meaningful with it. Asking around in the opentools newsgroup I found out that there's no interface to this new file browser. So I decided to rewrite the file browser as an IDE-expert. Thanks to the components of VirtualShellTools (http://www.mustangpeak.net) I managed to build a new Delphi 2007 IDE expert. It supports 2 types of auto-synchronizing.

1) All folders are visible and the file browser expands the path of the current project.
2) Only the project folder is visible (by changing the root folder)

The auto sync mode can only be changed in the form menu which is only visible in undocked mode. (sorry for that)

I've added a file filter so it can display only the file types you want, just like the original file browser. But it's also possible to set an exclude filter. So you can show all files, except *.dcu and so on.

You can download this expert here. It's version 0.1 and more or less a test version. You can also download the installer here.

I know it's far from perfect, but hey, it's a start.

Please send bug reports to drastic@pandora.be

Vrede feesten 2007 - Sint-Niklaas - day 2

drastic@pandora.be (Robin van Nooij) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 10:21:00 +0000

Last Saturday we visited the event again. A weather was much better.

Vrede feesten 2007 - Sint-Niklaas - day 1

drastic@pandora.be (Robin van Nooij) — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 07:23:00 +0000

Yesterday I visited a hot air balloon event in our city Sint-Niklaas. This is the video I made with my sony cybershot.

Editing HTML with TWebBrowser

drastic@pandora.be (Robin van Nooij) — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 13:38:00 +0000

Coltrui asked me if I knew any good HTML editors that can be used in a delphi application. I don't know any free components for Delphi for WYSIWYG editing. But I know the TWebBrowser has an edit mode.

So now it's time to get started on html editing with TWebBrowser. A few steps to get started:

1) add a TWebBrowser control to your application

2) open a webpage or an empty page.

ie. WebBrowser1.navigate('http://zinloos.be/wordpress');
WebBrowser1.navigate('about:blank');

3) Put TWebBrowser in edit mode.

(WebBrowser1.Document as IHTMLDocument2).DesignMode := 'On';

4) Start editing!

5) Save HTML to file

var
persist: IPersistFile;
begin
Persist := (WebBrowser1.Document as IPersistFile);
Persist.Save(StringToOleStr(ExtractFilePath(application.exename) +
'test.html'), True);
end;

These are some basics without special features. But you can select a part of the html text and press CTRL+B for BOLD, CTRL+I for ITALIC, CTRL+U for UNDERLINE.

Even creating a link with CTRL+K works great.

Continuous Integration with CruiseControl.NET

drastic@pandora.be (Robin van Nooij) — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 06:28:00 +0000

Steve Trefethen recently posted two blog articles about "continuous integration". These posts get you on track setting up your own environment.

The links are:

CCNetConfig to help you create and maintain your CruiseControl.NET server

Video: Setting up a continuous integration environment

I was curious so I tried to setup an CI-environment. It was much easier than excepected. Now running 4 projects using CruiseControl.NET. There's one Delphi5 project and 3 Delphi7 projects. In a few weeks I will also try a Delphi2007 project with MSBuild.

I managed to synchronize the executables version information with the published label. For this I use my own command line tool that uses a template to generate a
version.rc, which can be build by brcc32.exe (resource compiler) and linked into the projects.

I bet there must be an easier way to do this, so if you have info about doing this just let me know.

I'm still having problems publishing the latest build to a network drive since I get an "access is denied" error. But I'm not logged on to the domain and that's probably the reason why it doesn't work.

[update]
Changing the service login account to my user account fixed the problem.
[/update]

Here you can find an article about continuous integration by Martin Fowler

Open Tools Api

drastic@pandora.be (Robin van Nooij) — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 21:23:00 +0000

Jeremy North wrote an article about extending the project manager context menu. It's great to see more attention to the open tools. He hopes to write more than one article. So I sure have to keep an eye on his articles. Very interesting indeed.

Execute Delphi code from javascript using TWebbrowser

drastic@pandora.be (Robin van Nooij) — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:52:00 +0000

I just bumped into some really neat code. This code allows you to integrate your delphi application with the TWebBrowser component. You just hook in your application as the host of the TWebBrowser component. This will allow javascript to use your Delphi functions. It's like the welcome page in the Delphi IDE.

Just check out this link on www.delphidabbler.com

A little bit about me

drastic@pandora.be (Robin van Nooij) — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 06:56:00 +0000

I was born in 1977 in The Netherlands and currently living in Belgium. I started to do some programming in Basic somewhere back in the late 80s on a GoldStar MSX. But finally got a pc in early 90s. I started doing pascal coding using Turbo Pascal v5.5. While at school we learned pascal programming in version 3! I was glad to move on to Borland Pascal 7.0. Together with a friend we started coding packet radio software for Citizen Band (27Mhz). Which was used by several hundreds of people world wide. In 1998 it was time to learn delphi. I've used several delphi versions: 3, 4, 5 and 7 and Turbo Explorer. We are still using Delphi 5 and 7 at work, but they have purchased Delphi 2007, so I can't wait to start using that one.

I've downloaded the trial of 2007 and I really enjoy working with it so far.

The Delphi Hour

drastic@pandora.be (Robin van Nooij) — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 21:01:00 +0000

Stay tuned for the Delphi Hour. A live broadcast from ScottsValley, California by Nick Hodges.

Get the latest news about CodeGear and Delphi. This all during live broadcast.

Delphi Hour page

Also check out Audio & Video at the CodeGear Developer network.

Let's get started

drastic@pandora.be (Robin van Nooij) — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 19:17:00 +0000

Okay,

The weblog will be focussed on Object Pascal (also known as Delphi), but CodeGear is now refering back to Object Pascal as a language and Delphi as the tool to build the applications.

My current environments are:

at home - Turbo Delphi Explorer
at work - Delphi 5, Delphi 7 and soon Turbo Delphi Pro and Delphi 2007.

So far my first post, more information about myself will soon be online..but I have to get started somewhere.