Echoes From The Past: Message Master For Delphi a.k.a. MM4D

Some years ago, at the Delphi 6/7 timeframe I was working on a client/server program with c.a. 400 forms and 200 units. At that time I needed a simple way to localize in Italian (in primis) and in other languages, all the  standard dialogs (ShowMessage, InputBox, InputQuery etc.). Moreover, I would have liked to give a unique style to them. In addition, I needed to localize that dialogs. Moreover I needed a simple way to show a program of a background operation using a not modal dialog with a simple pattern like the following:

  ...
  ShowStatusPos(STATUS_CAPTION, Point(50, 50), True);
  try
    for i := 1 to 100 do
    begin
      SetupQuery(LMyDataset, i);
      LMyDataset.Open;
      while not LMyDataset.Eof do
      begin
        //do something
        UpdateStatus(i, Format(STATUS_CAPTION + ' %2d%%', [i]));
        LMyDataset.Next;
      end;
      LMyDataset.Close;
    end;
  finally
    CloseStatus;
  end;
  ...

So, after some tests I wrote Message Master for Delphi. MM4D is a smal library which supports all of these features, or at least these features were supported at that time. Indeed, since then I saw many (really many) 3rd-party Delphi/C++Builder written programs which actually use MM4D. However, since then I didn’t supported that library anymore. Now, more or less, 15 years after, a user wrote to my about MM4D support in Delphi 10 Seattle. So, I decided to update the code to let it compile on Delphi 10 Seattle. So, now it is currently supported (even if I dont plan to improve it in any way in the short term). However if someone use it or want to use it and update/upgrade/improve, here’s the github reporitories. I hope I have done something good for all the old time users.

Message Master For Delphi
https://github.com/danieleteti/mm4delphi

In the repositories there is a demo to show all the features of MM4D and there is also a small tool called UnitsAdded.exe which can be used to add the MM4D features to a project automatically (search for Dialogs.pas and, if exists, add MessDlgs after it).
MM4Delphi uses the good XiControls (included). So, still thank you to Eugene Genev for his XiControls.