mihaelamj.com » Delphi

Delphi (VCL) components portability between PCs

mihaelamj — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:00:52 +0000

About the question on StackOverflow :

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9140013/how-to-migrate-delphi-or-clone-delphi-registry-settings

How to migrate Delphi or clone Delphi registry settings?

I have some ideas

1. Where should VCL or LIb end up?

I propose making it a REQUIREMENT for third-party component vendors to place their “parts” into one of root directories:

VCL – for components (object inspector aware)

LIB – for libraries that do not descend from TComponents and TPersistant , so they do not save their data into dfm (NativeXML, Synapse)

Those parts would be:

/VCL

–/source

–/dcu

–/packages (d7..dxe2, or whatever the vendor chooses)

–/help (or doc) if not integrated into “Delphi” (MS Explorer) help

/LIB

–/ tsource

–/dcu

–/help (or doc) if not integrated into “Delphi” (MS Explorer) help

2. VCL or LIB compilation

There should NOT be a compilation of VCL/LIB during installation. Delphi would rather check those directories and compare it against it’s installed (design-time) packages upon start-up.

If any compilation is needed it should start before starting Delphi. Registration information and on-line checking of those can be accomplished before starting the actual compilation.

3.User registration

It should be handled by the vendor setup application before extracting the sources into designated folders (ref 1.). Maybe they can deliver encrypted setup file or something similar, and require on-line activation. That is up to them to decide.

4. Non-source VCLs and LIBs

No one should be using those, but if you do, then the vendor’s setup application would just put the dcus in appropriate directory, as well as help/ doc files.

5. Delphi Library path

It would include all from /VCL and /LIB directories by default. Not requiring adding to the actual “Library Path” in Options (this path would be used for Delphi’s own sources and libraries).

6. Delphi Browsing path

There should be a new dialog listing all assets (VCL and LIB) not already present in “Browsing Path” to be included or excluded at will of the user.

7. Platforms

Some vendors may be using IFDEFs to succumb that, and some use different directories and dcus in different directories.

There should be rules for those as well (just to make it uniform and easily portable).

I propose more branches in DCU directory:

/DCU

–/win

—-/32

—-/64

–/mac

—-/32

—-/64 (to come)

–/iOS

—-/32su

–/Linux (to come)

–/Android (to come)

Upon detecting the new VCL/LIB, Delphi would compile sources in respective directories. There should be a consensus about the definition of what is available from each vendor (some have FireMonkey support and some don’t. Some don’t even have win64 available). Those “capabilities” should be described in some “standard” way (MSBuild) or maybe just a new XML/JSON/plain-text format that would instruct Delphi compiler how to produce the required dcus.

Also to mention that the paths ( Library, Browse,…) should be dynamically loaded upon changing the destination platform .

8. Where to place the directories

In some writable directory like

Libraries\Documents (My Documents)

public or current user based.

9. The Resulting benefit:

Would be awseome: you could just copy all the third party directories (with /DCU directory if using the same Delphi version, or without). Then all third party components would “magically” work on a new, clean installation.

No related posts.

No.net or java apps on my desktop

mihaelamj — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 04:51:59 +0000

No Java on my PC

A few years back I was looking for a rich SVN client as an addition to great TortoiseSVN explorer extension. I found two :Syncro SVN and SmartSVN. I downloaded both and soon realized that they are both Java applications. They were way slower than TortoiseSVN. I stuck with Tortoise.

I do get that Java is great for enterprise web apps, but for desktop, end users, that’s just not it’s territory.

The GUI looks funny and outdated by decades. And the performance is just not what I’m used to, on windows desktop.

But Java is a truly multi-platform solution. And has many supporters in the industry. Oracle, Google…And Google only allows Java apps on it’s Android platform.

I guess that Google doesn’t want developers „misbehaving“ on their stack. Native on Android is for „the lords“ and Java for „the commons“.

No .net app out of my pocket

I guess I cannot say „no .net on my desktop“, cause I run Win7…

I would never pay for a desktop app done with .net. The GUI does look much better than Java’s, but it’s slower and less responsive. The overall performance of a .net application is order of magnitude lower than a native one.

In „the old days“ Microsoft basically had two tool-stacks: C++ with MVC for „the lords“ and VB for „the commons“. And with .net, I guess it’s „one to rule them all“. But it’s just „the commons“. C++ is still there, nut why no podcasts, blog posts, overall buzz about it? Maybe Microsoft doesn’t want you to know that they still have a „real compiler“.

I don’t work with C++, but with Delphi. I’m using a lot of windows native ( as in really compiled) applications done either in C++ or Delphi. And will continue to so..

No related posts.

Random names generator – Randy

mihaelamj — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 10:31:50 +0000

I have just published a little tool I did recently for generating random names and phone numbers. It’s a free windows application that generates and also lets you export the (pseudo)random data to csv, xls and xml.

Pseudo Random Data Generator - Randy

You can check it out here.

No related posts.

SAM Contacts: A Powerful Windows Contact Manager Released

mihaelamj — Tue, 12 May 2009 09:49:35 +0000

First Relese

I have just released my first MicroISV application SAM Contacts.

It’s a simple and easy to use contact manager application with some unique features like tag clouds and Google maps.

No.net or java apps on my desktop