Visit site Delphi Haven
August 2010
2
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Custom drawing on glass (1)
Delphi Haven
– As I noted in a previous post, large parts of the classic GDI (and therefore, TCanvas and its associated classes) are not alpha-channel aware, being as a result not suitable for drawing on glass. Because of this, if you actually want to make use of the GlassFrame property of TForm, it is frequently ...
1
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New version of my Exif parsing code (v1.1.1)
Delphi Haven
– I’ve put up a slight revision on my Exif and IPTC parsing code. The changes aren’t drastic – Tweaked default behaviour of file name variants of TCustomExifData.SaveToJPEG and TIPTCData.SaveToJPEG to write to a memory stream first. This protects against the case of when the file ...
July 2010
9
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Controls and glass
Delphi Haven
– Looking on Stack Overflow, I’ve just noticed a rather detailed question (really, set of questions) about Aero glass. As it currently stands, the question bears some misconceptions – for example, the questioner makes the false assertion that the VCL DoubleBuffered property ‘sets a window style bit ...
2
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Perhaps not
Delphi Haven
– Oddly enough, I don’t think the following actually does the guy any favours:
7
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Pathetic
Delphi Haven
– Simon Kissel popped up on the Embarcadero forums recently, in the first instance only to announce a small update to his CrossKylix project (it was last publicly updated six years ago). This was in the Delphi third party group; following that, he appears to have written a short ‘I’m ...
18
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Good luck Nick
Delphi Haven
– According to the forums (amongst other sources it now appears), Nick Hodges has left Embarcadero. As a complete outsider, I’ve got nothing to say really but for the title of this post: good luck for the future Nick!
May 2010
9
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And another…
Delphi Haven
– As I said in my last post, while I haven’t come across a code sample in the help as bad as the action manager one, I do find a slight air of dubiousness amongst the code examples generally. I don’t think this is a new phenomenon mind – the D7 help is in places just as bad. Neatly, ...
7
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Help!
Delphi Haven
– The terribleness of the contemporary Delphi help experience is obviously well known. Moreover, attempts to defend it have long since degenerated into self-parody. To take one particularly egregious example of the latter, recently uttered with a straight face on the Embarcadero forums: apparently, ...
April 2010
3
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Setting up a custom title bar – reprise
Delphi Haven
– As a follow up to my last post, I’ve written a small demo that (rather pointlessly of course) enables custom drawing in the main form’s title bar only to reinstate the standard elements. It does this across changes to the form’s BorderIcons, BorderStyle, Caption and Icon ...
5
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Setting up a custom title bar on Vista/Windows 7
Delphi Haven
– Back in the day, if you wanted to draw in a form’s title bar for some reason (to, for example, add one or more extra buttons), you would handle the WM_NCPAINT message and draw to a handle got from the GetDCEx function. While you can still do this with recent versions of Windows, it will cause ...
3
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Ever felt you’re being lied too? Well it just might be true…
Delphi Haven
– Here’s an occasionally infuriating thing: if you set a form’s BorderStyle property to anything other than bsNone or bsSizeable, it won’t now report its real size and position when running on Vista or (I assume) Windows 7. You can see this in effect on Vista at least if you set the ...
March 2010
1
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Quick quiz
Delphi Haven
– Consider this unit: unit CCR; interface type SysUtils = record const EmptyStr = 'Overridden'; end; implementation end. If the constant on the record type hurts your eyes (or you still use an ancient Delphi version), use this instead – unit CCR; interface type TSysUtils = record ...
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Quick tip: using MSXML v6 with TXMLDocument in D7-D2007
Delphi Haven
– By default, the VCL’s TXMLDocument class will delegate to MSXML for its actual parsing and writing. Now MSXML itself comes in various versions, with newer ones being installed side-by-side with older ones. To cope with this situation, the VCL tests for the existence of a number of them, the idea ...
2
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New CCR Exif release (now v1.1.0)
Delphi Haven
– I’ve just put up another revision of my Exif parsing/writing code. This release centres on improving how XMP packets are read and written (more details here), so there’s no interface changes of any significance. Anyhow, the download location is the same as always.
February 2010
0
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Small update to my Exif library (now v1.0.1)
Delphi Haven
– I’ve just put up another revision of my Exif parsing/writing code. There’s only a few changes from last time – TCustomExifData now accepts Exif segments that declare themselves to be big endian when they are really small endian or vice versa. elTrilinear renamed esTrilinear. In ...
