Delphi maintainers survival kit

This is going to be a short post. Just wanted to share my most important Delphi books in case there are other Java programmers out there who has to maintain Delphi apps. I like "Delphi in a nutshell". Especially the first two chapters which gives you a brief introduction to Delphi programming, and chapter 5 that is a (big) alphabetical language reference. Developer's Guide to Troubleshooting is a description of almost 1000 error message that you may get when programming Delphi, design-time, compile-time and run-time error messages. Great reference in case the company Delphi guru is at holiday when some strange error pops up : ) The USB stick below contains articles from issues 1 to 139 of The Delphi Magazine. There's a lot of well written articles there about different aspects of Delphi programming, including "cool" topics like unit testing and how to set up Delphi build scripts. Seems like blogging is less common in the Delphi camp, and it seems that those who do post about Delphi mostly writes for other Delphi developers. If you know anyone else who already blogs about it, please post a comment with a link to it. I would really appreciate it.

New web site for want

Want, the Delphi build tool I wrote about back in february, has launched a new web site: want-tool.org.

Looks like the new site is mostly geared towards the development of want 2, while I personally would have preferred some fixes to want 0.3.0 :)

Anyway, thanks for the great work you've done so far by giving us want, and I'm looking forward to see if you can make something even better. If want 2 doesn't turn out to be what I want, then I'll maybe patch 0.3.0 myself if i get tired of removing useverbose-statements. Hey, want is not bad (I tried want and finalbuilder in parallel but decided to go with want, because it's easier.)

New use for subversion

Have you ever been in the situation where you need to figure out exactly how some legacy software works? I have too, a couple of times. This time I was trying to make a build server for some old Delphi stuff, when I suddenly realized that much of the hard work could be simplified considerably by using version control together with vmware workstation. So I thought it might be worth sharing.

Here's what I did:

1. Installed xp on a virtual machine.
2. Checked the Borland\Delphi folder from program files into a subversion repo on my physical machine.
3. Installed cygwin and did a ls -laR>>somefile.txt from windows/system32, and checked the file into subversion.
4. Exported each of the root branches from the windows registry to text files and checked them into the repository.

Now, for each upgrade I do, I can just check the new files into the repo, save a snapshot of the virtual machine and continue. If something goes wrong, rewind the virtual machine and try something else.

By having the registry dumped to text files I can at least use a good diff tool to see what each update has changed.

Hope this helps someone else, cause I wish somebody had told me this a couple of years ago.

Building Delphi programs using Want

I've recently been trying to get some Delphi code into continuous integration using want. As there's very little available documentation on the net on this subject, I decided to collect what I've found out.

Want is an ant-like build tool for Delphi. It's available from sourceforge.net, but if you want the latest and greatest binaries, you might (at the time I'm writing this) just as well download it from this confluence page. There's also a jira issue tracker on the same site. You'd most likely also want to have a look at a new page about want available here:www.optimax.com/want/, and the forums that are available at the same site. Although want is no longer maintained by the original author, it seems he's still frequenting the forums. Seems like Delphi build tools is a rather odd topic, so there's almost no flaming and also few pleeeaase help me! topics :)

I'd also like to link to some articles that talk about want. Here's one from CODEGEAR, and from elvenware.

If you're serious about using want for your Delphi builds, the best thing you can do is probably read the builds scripts from the want project itself, and from the DUnit project. They are both easily available from this page: www.suigeneris.org/kb/display/WANT/Home.

Finally: Don't forget to have a look at these alternatives: NAnt (open source) and FinalBuilder (commercial). Here's an example of how to build a Delphi project with Nant and CruiseControl.Net: Extreme Programming in a Delphi Context.

Have you used want, tried to get Delphi into continuous integration?

Delphi 6 and Perforce

Using Delphi 6 with Perforce can be a cumbersome process. Coming from Eclipse I'm used to having the IDE opening the files for edit. Last week I tried to get Delphi to do the same. Here's what I did:

1. Search for delphi perforce 6
2. First result: Chris Fairall's Home Page - Delphi
3. Dowloading, compiling and installing, gives a new menu:
4. I tried to click logout on the new menu. That was stupid. Trying to login again I got this message box:
5. Agent Ransack, search for files containing ExplicitTop. Thats FormLogin.dfm
6. Open in notepad++, remove both occurrences of ExplicitTop
7. Return to Delphi. Recompile, install, login.
8. It works! I can log back in. Now if could only remember the password : )