Unofficial JEDI JCL and JVCL patch for Delphi XE8

- and honorable mentioning of the new GetIt package manager in XE8.

Update 21. September 2015: Delphi 10 Seattle now has JCL and JVCL available in GetIt.

Update 10. April 2015: Seems like a proper official update is being done - activity on GitHub - Thanks :-) - so ignore my patch files. So I don't have to roll up my sleves during the weekend to do a proper job. EMBT has expressed interest in getting the JVCL into the GetIt package manager.

I was in the process of mixing together a small mock-up – using VirtualTreeView and some JEDI VCL components in XE7, when I couldn't resist the urge to install XE8 on that machine – since there are many of the new features I wanted badly.

Do you miss the days at BorCon?

- or things I should had gotten rid of years back - maybe :-D

I had, or maybe I still have a tendency to save old stuff that have some sentimental value - my wife would probably say she had the same - still having me around.

Well anyway, I have decided to digitized the most of that old stuff - things I haven't used or looked at for years - digitizing it so I would not feel a sentimental loss - lets hope my wife won't settle with a digital photograph of me - or a 3D model (that would be cool).

Get to know your database

- or how to make your database applications shine.

Once in a while I stumble across fellow developers or applications, that could shine by doing things a bit differently and adding extra skills to their tool set - a change of focus might be the only thing that is needed.

One example is the art of refactoring, another is some basic database knowledge.

I have several times meet people and companies who develop business application that depend heavily on database access - that uses their chosen RDBMS just as a bucket.

Let me give some examples of "performance smells" - you might easily expand the list, and please do in the comments.

TIniFiles and its alternatives

- or how to make legacy applications survive, with less work.

When applications gets an “End of Life” sentence – it doesn’t mean that they just can be closed down – they might need to wait for their successor to be build – and meanwhile it has to survive in the field of changing infrastructure, OS upgrades and consolidation.

What at the time seemed like a good idea and best practice, would end up as the sins of the past. INI files could be one of these – and here are some minor tips on what can be done to conform to newer or changed environments – without rewriting too much code.

Git’ Delphi

- or why you should use version control for your precious source code.

A while back Jim Mckeeth tweetet a link to getAwesomeness - listing some nice Delphi projects on GitHub. Which brings me to the point of this post; a brief intro to the wonderful world of version control systems – and why you should start using one, if you do not already do.

Delphi comes with build-in support for Subversion (since XE2), Git (since XE7) and probably others to be added later. A number of third party plug-ins exists supporting some of the other systems out there.

Photo nostalgia #DelphiWeek

#DelphiWeek fun...

Today I did receive a #DelphiWeek tweet: https://twitter.com/tndelphifan/status/564466113325826048/photo/1 - marking the start of a whole week with extra much Delphi-related stuff going on – showing numerous Delphi CD's from older versions – so I thought I would just supplement the collection by adding pictures of some of the missing ones, and some more rare ones. Warning! nostalgic pictures below :-)

Fun with codepages, unicode and encoding

...or how to survive in the encoding jungle, with some helpful tools.

I have several times stumble into encoding issues between legacy applications and modern "Unicode" capable ones.

In the following I will try to explain the basics in a simple way - and also supply the source and binary (if there are anyone out there that needs the utility - but don't need a compiler) for a small utility that takes a file containing Unicode characters and encodes it into a given code page. I was a bit surprised that I wasn't able to find such a utility at that time - so I did one to solve the problem.