If you have tried to work on GExperts (or any other DLL-based Delphi IDE expert) you have probably encountered this annoyance: Of course you want GExperts to be active in your IDE so you can use its features. But if you then compile it, the output file already exists and is locked because it is … Continue reading Compiling GExperts while the DLL is loaded in the IDE →

Sometimes the uses lists become an issue, when you want to keep your source code backwards compatible to older Delphi versions. This usually happens when some declaration was moved from one RTL/VCL unit to a different one. One example is TAction which has moved from the unit ActnList to the new unit Actions which was … Continue reading Backwards compatibility of uses lists →

Today vanity caught up with me and I decided to add myself to the list of "major contributors" shown on the GExperts About dialog. But this list has become rather long over the years (actually it is surprisingly short given the time GExperts has been in existence), so only the top few names are visible. … Continue reading Automatically scroll a memo line by line in Delphi →

There was a major bug in yesterday's experimental GExperts release 1.38 2016-01-09. As discovered and reported by +Karheinz Jansen the Delphi IDE could crash when closing and show cascaded access violations. This was caused by a bug in the handling of dockable forms, which has now been fixed. And since I was at it, I … Continue reading Bugfix release experimental GExperts 1.38 2016-01-10 →

Because I messed up the dockable form handling for the new Bookmarks expert which resulted in spurious cascading access violations when closing the Delphi IDE, I had to revisit that code. And so I can look up the information I gathered fixing that problem, I'm putting it here for later reference. Basically, you create a … Continue reading Dockable form handling within GExperts →

New year, new GExperts 😉 I just want to show off the one new feature that resides in the IDE tab of the configuration dialog: (I also fixed the tab order in this dialog.) What does it do? Quite simpple: It shows a little '...' button in the package list dialog(s). You get this dialog … Continue reading Experimental GExperts Version 1.38 2016-01-09 released →

Just in time for the holidays, here it is, the Christmas release of my experimental GExperts version. You might already have read my blog posts about the work on some of the new features, but let's start with the "boring" one: I fixed the Unicode support again, this time actually the non-Unicode support because the … Continue reading Experimental GExperts Version 1.38 2015-12-22 released →

Don't you just hate it when you sit in front of a 24" monitor and have to use a form that is the size of a postage stamp? GExperts has got a nifty feature where it makes forms of the Delphi IDE sizable that aren't by default. This works only for some forms and I … Continue reading Making a Delphi form sizable without changing BorderStyle →

Again, there is nothing new about the formatter code. But there is a new option to improve the IDE search path dialogs: What it does is replace the list box in the search path dialog with a memo, so editing that path is much easier (in my opinion) than before. Unfortunately I have yet to … Continue reading Experimental GExperts Version 1.38 2015-10-21 released →

In the comments to my Google+ post announcing my blog post on Hacking the Delphi 10 Project Options dialog Ondrej Kelle said: If two or more plugins hijack the same global event handler then they must restore the previous (from their point of view) handler in reverse order, however this is not guaranteed and therefore … Continue reading Safe event hooking and unhooking (for Delphi IDE plugins) →