PortableAppsToStartMenu 1.0.0

 Delphi  Comments Off on PortableAppsToStartMenu 1.0.0
Nov 012020
 

Tired of all those programs which install lots of additional stuff I have been using more and more so called “Portable Apps”. “Portable” in this context means: You can put them anywhere, even on a portable storage device and start them from there. These Programs are still Windows only. And of course nobody prevents you from putting them in a folder on the system harddisk, usually c:\PortableApps. All files these programs need are inside this one folder, so in order to move or copy them, you simply move/copy that folder.

There is a dedicated launcher and updater for these types of programs at portableapps.com, which is written in Delphi btw. and the source code is available.

One thing that has irked me all the time is that these programs don’t show up in the Windows start menu, unless I add them manually, which I usually don’t. Today I had enough and wrote PortableAppsToStartMenu, a tool which given a PortableApps directory collects all the executables stored there and creates shortcuts in the Windows Start Menu for them. They will be visible in the PortableApps folder there. Apparently there was no such tool so far.

This is what the program looks like:

Some feature highlights:

  • You can drag the PortableApps directory on the entry field to set it.
  • The entry field has autocompletion for directories.
  • There are options to
    • Hide the Portable Apps Platform tools
    • Hide apps hidden in the launcher
    • Hide the “Portable” part of the executable name
  • It’s also possible to select the apps manually, but that’s rather cumbersome.

And these are the entries it has added to my start menu:

The entries are also available through the Start Menu’s usual search/filter functionality:

The program itself is of course a portable app, but not available from portableapps.com but only from OSDN. The program is written in in Delphi 10.2 and the source code is also available there.

If you want to discuss this article, go to the related post in the international DelphiPraxis forum.

 Posted by on 2020-11-01 at 18:49

GExperts 1.3.17 experimental twm 2020-10-23 released

 Delphi, GExperts  Comments Off on GExperts 1.3.17 experimental twm 2020-10-23 released
Oct 232020
 

Guess what? The new GExperts release is here.

There are lots of bug fixes and a few new features in the new version.

The major new feature is the Filter Exceptions expert. Please be warned that there was a bug when developing for non-Windows targets. It might have been fixed, but I can’t test it and nobody else bothered to volunteer to test it. So there you go: Now you will be a tester, if you like it or not. If you encounter this problem, please file a bug report!

There is also a small improvement in PE Information tool (I won’t call it an expert any more because it’s now a stand alone executable that GExperts only calls.)

Also, the installer is now based on InnoSetup 5.6.1 which was the last version compatible with Windows XP. So, installing GExperts on Windows XP (VMs) should work again.

I hope this time the installers won’t be wrongly detected as malware by virus scanners. Sorry about that.

Please note that GExperts for Delphi 10.4 requires Update 1!

The new version is available for download on the GExperts download page.

If you want to discuss this article, you can do so in the corresponding post in the international Delphi Praxis forum.

 Posted by on 2020-10-23 at 18:07

Bug and possible fix for GExperts Filter Exceptions expert – testers needed

 Delphi, GExperts  Comments Off on Bug and possible fix for GExperts Filter Exceptions expert – testers needed
Sep 272020
 

Mahdi Safsafi has proposed a fix for the bug in the GExperts Filter Exceptions expert, which occurs when developing for non Windows targets (first reported on Embarcadero’s quality portal ). I have implemented this fix and it doesn’t have any adverse effects on for Windows targets. But neither he nor I can test it for non Windows targets since we don’t develop for these. That means we need testers. If you want to help, please post a comment on the bug report on SourceForge.

 Posted by on 2020-09-27 at 13:27

Source code for Andreas Hausladen’s DfmCheck available

 Delphi  Comments Off on Source code for Andreas Hausladen’s DfmCheck available
Sep 092020
 

Andreas Hausladen – most probably know him because he wrote the very popular Delphi IDE Fixpack – has just announced (in German) that he published the source code of one of his other useful tools: DFMCheck. It’s in his GitHub repository.

Now I have just to figure out how to actually use it. 😉

 Posted by on 2020-09-09 at 09:21

GExperts for Delphi 10.4.1

 Delphi, GExperts  Comments Off on GExperts for Delphi 10.4.1
Sep 052020
 

I have received a few reports about bugs in GExperts in Delphi 10.4.1 that do not occur in Delphi 10.4. Here is a GExperts DLL that was compiled with Delphi 10.4.1. Maybe it will solve some of theses problems.

Simply extract the DLL and put it into the GExperts installation directory, replacing the original one.

Let me know on Delphi Praxis whether this fixes the problems.

 Posted by on 2020-09-05 at 11:36

Delphi’s TZipFile working on a stream

 Delphi  Comments Off on Delphi’s TZipFile working on a stream
Aug 202020
 

Recent versions of Delphi (for a suitable definition of “recent”) come with a TZipFile class implemented in the unit System.Zip. This class has the really neat feature that it can not only read the contents of a ZIP file directly from a stream but also extract a file from that stream to a TBytes array, thus it does not require any file system access.

E.g. imagine you have got a memory stream containing the contents of a ZIP archive (e.g. you got a zipped XML description from a GenICam compatible camera using the GCReadPort (PDF) function.). You now want to read a file from this stream and immediately process that file’s content without first writing it to the file system. This can be done like this:

var
  ms: TMemoryStream;
  ZIP TZipFile;
  Data: TBytes;
  // [...]
begin
  //
  // Some code here retrieves the ZIP archive's content and stores it in ms
  //
  Zip := TZipFile.Create;
  try
    ms.Position := 0;
    Zip.Open(ms, zmRead);
    if Zip.FileCount > 0 then begin
      Zip.Read(0, Data);
    end;
  finally
    FreeAndNil(Zip);
  end;
  //
  // now we have the file's content in Data and can process it.
  //
end;

One very important step here is to set the stream’s position to 0 before passing it to TZipFile.Open. If you forget that (guess who did) you will likely get an EZipException in TZipFile.Read with the error message ‘Invalid Zip Local Header signature’. The reason for this is that TZipFile.Open assumes that the current stream position is the first byte of the first file stored in the ZIP archive:

procedure TZipFile.Open(ZipFileStream: TStream; OpenMode: TZipMode);
begin
  // [...]
  FStream := ZipFileStream;
  FStartFileData := FStream.Position;
  // [...]
end;

If it isn’t, it will try to read the files starting from that position and will fail with the exception mentioned above.

If you want to discuss this article, you can do so in the corresponding post in the international Delphi Praxis forum.

 Posted by on 2020-08-20 at 18:08

Filtering and sorting for the GExperts PE Information Exports list

 Delphi, GExperts  Comments Off on Filtering and sorting for the GExperts PE Information Exports list
Aug 092020
 

The GExperts PE Information tool just got a small improvement:

The Exports list can now be sorted by clicking on the column header and filtered on the export name by simply typing text.

The Escape key resets the filter.

If you want to discuss this article, you can do so in the corresponding post in the international Delphi Praxis forum.

 Posted by on 2020-08-09 at 14:44

External Exception $406D1388 in Delphi

 Delphi  Comments Off on External Exception $406D1388 in Delphi
Aug 012020
 

Reminder to self: Exception $406D1388 is the exception used to set a name for a thread, like in:

procedure SetThreadName(const _Name: AnsiString);
var
  ThreadNameInfo: TThreadNameInfo;
begin
  ThreadNameInfo.FType := $1000;
  ThreadNameInfo.FName := PAnsiChar(_Name);
  ThreadNameInfo.FThreadID := $FFFFFFFF;
  ThreadNameInfo.FFlags := 0;
  try
    RaiseException($406D1388, 0, SizeOf(ThreadNameInfo) div SizeOf(LongWord), Pointer(@ThreadNameInfo));
  except
    // ignore
  end;
end;

If you encounter this in a debugging session, simply add it to the OS Exceptions and set “Handled by” to “User program” and “On Resume” to “Run handled” (The program should handle it, it’s a bug if not. But we don’t want to see it at all.)

 Posted by on 2020-08-01 at 19:30

IntToHex for UInt64 in Delphi

 Delphi  Comments Off on IntToHex for UInt64 in Delphi
Jul 292020
 

Just in case I ever need this again:

function IntToHex(_Value: UInt64): string; overload;
var
  Buf: PUInt32;
begin
  Buf := PUInt32(UInt32(@_Value) + 8);
  Result := IntToHex(Buf^, 8);
  Buf := PUInt32(@_Value);
  Result := Result + IntToHex(Buf^, 8);
end;

(Delphi 2007 does not have IntToHex for UInt64.)

Note: This works only for 32 bit compilers. For 64 bit, you must replace UInt32 with NativeUInt (or UInt64) in the first line (untested). Since unfortunately the NativeUInt declaration in Delphi 2007 is wrong, I cannot simply use NativeUInt here and be done with it.

Note: This works only on little endian systems (Intel):

"The little-endian system has the property that the same value can be read from memory at different lengths without using different addresses (even when alignment restrictions are imposed). For example, a 32-bit memory location with content 4A 00 00 00 can be read at the same address as either 8-bit (value = 4A), 16-bit (004A), 24-bit (00004A), or 32-bit (0000004A), all of which retain the same numeric value. Although this little-endian property is rarely used directly by high-level programmers, it is often employed by code optimizers as well as by assembly language programmers."

Source: Wikipedia – Endianness

 Posted by on 2020-07-29 at 14:38
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