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November 2011
7
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XE2 Update 2
Delphi Haven
– I’ve just installed XE2 update 2, which wasn’t hassle-free – after a few minutes, the installer seemed to hang on what was labelled the ‘validating install’ stage. Looking at Task Manager, I saw a Windows Installer process maxing out a core, so I killed it and rebooted. ...
October 2011
7
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You know the documentation is really bad when…
Delphi Haven
– … even a prominent ‘Product Line Manager and Technical Lead Evangelist’ for Delphi gets something pretty simple wrong: pace a recent post by Andreano Lanusse, TXMLDocument is in fact available for OS X development. The issue he had (I assume) was with the DOMVendor property: drop a ...
0
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Two small Core Foundation tips
Delphi Haven
– Core Foundation is a straight C, yet object-orientated API layer of OS X. Here’s a couple of small tips: 1. Much of the source for Core Foundation is freely available, so if you’re wondering whether a CFArray will retain its items on creation (for example), wonder no more ...
5
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FireMonkey forms and DLLs/dylibs
Delphi Haven
– Well I’ll start with what actually worked – a FireMonkey form being shown from an Excel spreadsheet on the Mac (yes, the Mac – Windows refugees unite!): Bizarre as it may sound, this combination was actually quite easy to get working. Here’s the VBA code behind the button: ...
3
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The broken FMX TOpenDialog
Delphi Haven
– Both Core Foundation and Cocoa – Apple’s ‘high level’ APIs (the first for C, the second Objective-C) – use UTF-16 encoding for strings, just like Delphi. Alas, but the XE2 source code consistently ignores this fact, and uses UTF-8 roundtrips instead. I can guess why: on ...
4
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Copying and pasting the contents of a FireMonkey TBitmap
Delphi Haven
– One of the various things not yet implemented in FireMonkey is TClipboard. In FMX.Platform you can find routines for getting and setting text on the clipboard (using Variant arguments – I’ve no idea either), but nothing beyond that. On the forums, Mehmed Ali Caliskan posted some code ...
September 2011
5
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Converting from a Cocoa string to a Delphi string
Delphi Haven
– Reading Malcolm Groves’ useful little post about retrieving special directories in OS X, I noticed he converted from Cocoa to Delphi strings by calling the former’s UTF8String function. Given Cocoa strings are already UTF-16 encoded just like Delphi strings,* this would cause a ...
4
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A few Mac tips
Delphi Haven
– At the risk of the blind leading the blind… An OS X GUI application is conventionally ‘bundled’ or put into a special directory structure whose root has an .app extension (see here and scroll down for Apple’s documentation on what the structure actually entails). In Finder ...
9
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We can expect ‘frequent and regular FireMonkey updates’
Delphi Haven
– … sayeth the new Delphi/RAD Studio project manager, echoing both a previous statement of his and similar words by Michael Swindell. Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we? From where I’m looking, FireMonkey is doing an excellent impression of being another Delphi for PHP. Maybe ...
5
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A console window that gets on with Unicode – fancy that
Delphi Haven
– Like quite possibly a good proportion of people syndicated on DelphiFeeds.com, I’ve recently acquired a Mac. Being cheap, it’s only a refurbished iMac, but it looks good (and was spotless when taken out of the box). In terms of first impressions, I’ve found OS X a bit ...
9
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Fixing the FMX menu loop bug on Windows
Delphi Haven
– I’ve discovered a very simple bug in the implementation of FMX menu loops on Windows. This bug leads to what is in effect an Application.ProcessMessages loop in VCL terms, causing a CPU spike for the duration an FMX menu is shown. To fix, copy both FMX.Platform.Win.pas and FMX.Defines.inc to ...
2
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Getting the XE2 setup file
Delphi Haven
– While I’m about it, here’s another small XE2 installation-related tip: I bought my copy from Digital River in their capacity as the official Embarcadero store, but then had problems dowloading the setup file from them. Going over to the Embarcadero site proper, I registered for the XE2 ...
2
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XE2 (or more exactly, MSBuild) vs. HP notebooks
Delphi Haven
– For all I know it may have been an issue with earlier versions, but I’ve just installed XE2 Pro on my HP notebook (it already had XE Starter and a few VS Expresses) and stumbled across a small issue. When attempting to compile, the following error message came up: [Error Error] Invalid ...
July 2011
1
vote
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Generic linked lists redux
Delphi Haven
– Do generics and typed pointers mix? Certainly, so long as you use a nested type: type TOuterType<T> = class public type PInnerType = ^TInnerType; TInnerType = record Value: T; end; end; OK, so the New/Dispose bug still holds, but that’s only a minor irritant. ...
4
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Interesting…
Delphi Haven
– Most of it’s just a copy of the XE (or should I say XE1?) demo tree, but a couple are new: http://radstudiodemos.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/radstudiodemos/branches/RadStudio_XE2/Delphi/ No EXEs though! I’ll leave the Sovietology to a certain frothy blogger-cum-team of bloggers (if said ...
