Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Merry Christmas to all.

Merry Christmas everyone. Here are some fun things for you to play with over the Christmas break.  Remember to put your laptop down and just hang out with those family people.

Some Toys to play with:
First, a list of interesting free stuff, a present from Scott Hanselman.

Some Delphi Specific Fun Things:

Apologies if you've seen these before, but hopefully these will be new to some of you.



  • The Itinerant Developer blogged about a Firemonkey Container for VCL forms in July, I missed it then, if you did too, check it out. Pretty cool. 
  • Nick Hodge's awesome new book mentions Delphi-Mocks by Vincent Parrett.    I'm playing with this right now, to increase my unit-testing powers. If you never read Vincent's intro post about it, this is a good read, even though it's been a year. I get the idea that lots of people still haven't seen the need for this yet, which means they aren't testing enough.
  • If you still haven't downloaded it, you owe it to yourself to go get Andreas Hausladen's latest IDE Fix Pack for your Delphi/RAD Studio.  Thanks Andreas for building such a great add-on. I use it and swear by it, for Delphi XE2, XE4, and XE5 which are the versions I have active coding duties in right now.

Update:  Wow, great link at The Old New Thing to James Micken's blog.  Worth reading everything that Raymond Chen has linked to there.  Every serious Delphi (or Win32 C/C++) developer should read Raymond Chen's blog, The Old New Thing.  But you all are already reading it, right? I especially love the first link, about systems programming, called "The Night Watch".









4 comments:

  1. Thanks for posting about TFireMonkeyContainer! I hope it's useful :)

    A better link is to my blog's Components page here: http://itinerantdeveloper.blogspot.ca/p/open-source.html which includes links to all posts about each specific component - there are a couple about this one.

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  2. Thanks for the plug for Nick Hodges' book. I may have to move from XE4 to XE5 just to get it.

    Anyone know where I can find XE4 code for sprites? I'm porting code that uses the old Graphics32 and now I'm scratching my head at TImage.BeginUpdate and TCanvas.BeginScene. Just simple(!) stuff like copying only a rectangular area from an off screen bitmap to the screen has me pulling my hair out.

    I sent Embarcadero fixes to TBitMap.CreateFromBitMapAndMask() but the fact that it was broken makes me feel like the only person doing low level graphics in FireMonkey.

    And readers of this blog seem to be much smarter than the average bear. :)

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  3. It's interesting (at least to me) how many of the tools on Scott Hanselman's list were written in Delphi.

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  4. Good point, Bruce! Delphi, as always, rules.

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