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Hello. This article is part of a series where we speak with professional software developers, ask them what it’s like to write code for a living, and perhaps gain a few insights into the software development industry along the way. In our interview chair today we have the simply marvelous Dalija Prasnikar. Dalija is based in the wonderfully historic and picturesque city of Zageb in Croatia. You’ll hear more in a moment about Dalija’s development background but she also is an accomplished photographer as well as a respected author of some great coding books too. You can tell she’s a proper coder – she’s the only one so far to have returned her answers using MarkDown! Dalija, thanks for agreeing to take part in the interviews! Thank you 🙂 What would be your brief evening news summary of who you are and what you do? Software Developer, Consultant, Book Author, Embarcadero MVP. Crashing other people’s software and writing my own since ’85. Which Embarcadero product(s) do you use a) the most b) regularly? Delphi, of course. How and/or why did you become a developer? When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. I was really into space, astronomy, science… and anything related to them. When I was about nine, the first Sci-Fi series I remember watching was Blake’s 7. And my favorite character there was Kerr Avon. A highly intelligent, sarcastic, computer genius. At the very beginning of the series, he said “Who controls the computer, controls the ship,” and this was the crucial moment when “I want to be an astronaut” evolved into “I want to control the computers.” Of course, in real life, being a developer and knowing what I know now, controlling the computers and the ship is really an illusion. More often, it is the other way around. That is also why I never fully trust anything tech-related. Do you think you will ever stop being a developer? If so, what would be next? I could probably be a farmer… but I would be a farmer that writes code as a hobby. [Me too! We should both speak to fellow developer Alister Christie – he lives on a lifestyle block – IanB] What made you start using Delphi/C++ Builder? I learned Turbo Pascal in high school, and it quickly become my favorite language. It could do everything C could do, and it was much faster – not only for writing code, but for compiling, too. I started my career as an IT journalist at BYTE Croatia (a McGraw-Hill licensee), and the Editor of MIPS Computer magazine. With the rise of the Internet and online publishing in the ’90s, I moved to web development. I was using Java and JavaScript before I started to use Delphi. Coming from Turbo Pascal, which I had also been using all along for writing various utilities and web page generators, Delphi was a natural choice for developing Windows applications. Dalija, in full-on MVP mode! What are you currently working on? As you know, I have already written two Delphi books: Delphi Memory Management and Delphi Event-based and Asynchronous Programming. I like writing books. It is an opportunity to share knowledge, but also an opportunity to learn. No matter how much you know about some topic, there are always […]

Last week we saw the release of RAD Studio 11 Alexandria and the what’s new webinar. The turn out for all three sessions was amazing! Just in case you missed it, or want to review, here is the replay. It is over 3 hours long as it include a recording of the live Q&A sessions at the end (the text log of the questions is below the video too). Just like the RAD Studio IDE, the video is available in 4K. Q&A Log Question: Every time someone makes a ‘this one goes up to 11’ Spinal Tap joke they have to buy everyone on the team a donut. 😉 A: Oh, donuts for everyone! Question: good afternoon from Germany. A: Good morning from Idaho! Glad you could join us! Question: Hi from Belgium A: Hi Question: Greetings everyone from Perth AU. A: wow, Perth. I’ve been there, but not recently. I’d love to go back. /Jim,Hello from a fellow Aussie! Question: good afternoon from Paris A: Hello! Question: Good Morning from Mexico!! A: Thanks for joining us! Question: Hi from the beautiful island of Cyprus!! A: Hello! Question: Good afternoon everybody, greetings from Brazil A: Hello! Question: good morning from Utah A: Utah! We are neighbors! Do you know Eric? Question: Hi from Algeria A: Thanks for joining us! Question: Greetings from Germany A: So many great developers in Germany! Thanks for joining. Question: Good morning from Port Dover Canada on the north shore of Lake Erie. A: Hi to all Question: Greetings from Belgium. A: Hi to all Question: Good afternoon from The Netherlands A: Hello! Question: So… good afternoon also from Italy! A: Hello! Question: goof afternoon from Brazil A: Yay Brazil! I love Brazil. Last year was the first year I didn’t visit Brazil since joining Embarcadero 8 years ago. /Jim Question: good morning from Mexico A: Hello! Question: Good afternoon from Germany ! A: Hello! Question: Hello from the Netherlands A: Hello! Question: Hi from Slovenia! 🙂 A: Hello! I (David here) visited Slovenia in August, it was lovely Question: Hi Guys A: Hi to all Question: Austria is ONLINE A: Welcome! Question: Good afternoon from Finland A: Good afternoon from Estonia! Question: From Brazil A: Hi Question: Good evening from Uzbekistan! A: Hello! Question: good afternoon from the Netherlands A: Hello! Question: HI from Italy! A: Hi to all Question: Hi from Korea A: Hello! Question: Hi from Turkey A: Hello! Question: Hi from Tabasco, Mexico A: Hello! Question: Hi from Switzerland A: Hi to all Question: Hi from Brazil! A: Hi to all Question: Greetings from the south of England! A: Nice. England is on my bucket list of places to visit. /Jim Question: HIi from Portugal A: Hi to all Question: Hello from ISRAEL! A: Hi to all Question: Hi from Bulgaria A: Hello! Question: Hi from Germany (Ahrtal: Bad Neuenahr) A: Hello! Question: Hello from Bucharest! A: Hello! Question: Greetings from Indonesia… A: Hello! Question: Australia here A: Hello from a fellow Aussie,???????? Question: hi from italy A: Hello! Question: Good morning, people!!! A: Hello! Question: Hi from Holland A: Hello! Question: Hello from the Caribbean (Dominican Republic). A: Hello! Question: greetings from mumbai A: Hello! I had the pleasure of visiting Mumbai! Would love to come back again. /Jim Question: hello […]

We know that technology is progressing at a rapid pace. The software systems built five years ago using the then-modern technologies might not be relevant today due to outdated versions. Every software that aims to scale and provide effective services to its consumers must be open to modernization. Modernization of software systems enhances their longevity and keeps them relevant to the technological age in which they are operating.  This thought process is equally valuable to desktop apps. Application stakeholders have an imperative to recognize the need to modernize desktop software in a timely manner to efficiently continue providing services which remain competitive in the face of competition; embracing new technologies, advancements in techniques and user interface design and even fashions for UX paradigms which wax and wane. In this blog post, we’ll look at how you can modernize your Windows apps on time and that too under your approved budget.  How can I modernize my Delphi app? Embarcadero Technologies published a whitepaper titled “Successfully Modernizing A Popular Windows C++ IDE” that discusses the aspects and strategies used to modernize DevC++ IDE. This migration and up-gradation activity is an extremely important and valuable learning resource for the teams that plan on app migration.  The upgrade of DevC++ IDE was done in two phases. The first phase aimed at making the least possible changes to make the application compile with the newer version of Delphi. After that, the second phase involved changes such as compiler upgrade, Unicode support, and full support for Windows 10 with Embarcadero DevC++ 6.0.  The case study mentions that there were some important third-party upgrades as well. The most important of all were SynEdit, FastMM4, AStyle, and TDM-GCC. The Embarcadero team identified the components to be upgraded and that is indeed one of the essential and crucial steps towards any third-party migration.  The upgrade, as a result, provided a new and modern interface along with a faster and smoother Windows development in C++.  Just like the DevC++ IDE upgrade, you can also follow similar steps to migrate your Delphi application for a smoother and better developer and user experience.  Read the Successfully Modernizing A Popular Windows C++ IDE whitepaper to explore more about the DevC++ IDE upgrade.  What are some of the essential elements for migration and up-gradation? If you are considering modernizing your legacy Delphi desktop application, you might think of the following essential migration and modernization strategies, to begin with.  Why was Unicode important? Prior to the mid 2000s, Unicode was not often considered a technology of enough importance to include in most systems available on the market. With a more widespread adoption and availability of internet connectivity support for character sets which were able to render a broad range of languages became a pressing issue. People wanted their programs to be displaying text in the language they spoke and read rather than English which had become the Internet’s Lingua Franca (an ironic phrase if you think about it). Unicode allowed, for example, Russians to read and use Cyrillic characters or Japanese users to choose to display screens using Kanji should they choose to do so. Unicode support was added to Delphi, C++ Builder, and RAD Studio in 2009. There are multiple resources that help with the migration and upgrading of legacy Delphi applications to a newer […]

The goal of this tutorial is to describe the Delphi development ecosystem. It can be helpful for someone coming to Delphi from another programming language. Delphi is really easy to learn – the programming language syntax can be learned in hours. Pascal, from which Delphi’s Object Pascal language has evolved, has long been a very popular language in colleges and education for teaching the basic concepts of software development. Knowing the fundamentals of programming is a crucial part of programming. But there lies a whole ecosystem of terminology and techniques. It is always overwhelming for someone coming from a different background in technology. The other trouble is that there are so many different Delphi components, examples and libraries available and it can be quite daunting to decide which ones are the best for any given purpose. You’re spoilt for choice and sometimes too much choice can bring its own headaches. So to try and ease this small learning curve this article brings together a list of some of the most popular tools, libraries, best practices in Delphi. You may find more interesting demonstrations, tips, and tricks on our blog. How to start Delphi development? The first thing to do is to download Delphi from www.embarcadero.com. You can find the latest Delphi 10.4.2 Community Edition which is free for everyone. Be sure to install Delphi IDE with samples and help files that might come for help sometime in the future. How to work with Delphi programs in another code editor like VS Code? There is an official extension for Embarcadero Delphi in VS Code marketplace which provides you to work with the Delphi code in VS Code smoothly. Note that you need an active license (paid or trial) for Delphi 11 in order to use the DelphiLSP VS Code add-on. It will not work with the community edition. Yo use the DelphiLSP VS Code Add-In you just need to have the latest version of Embarcadero Delphi installed on your machine and generate an LSP config file. How to write readable and maintainable code in Delphi? Embarcadero Delphi compilers ignore any whitespace and allow for a lot of flexibility for writing code. But for the readability and maintainability purpose of the source code, Embarcadero has defined the style guide for Delphi’s Object Pascal. I recommend you to check out and learn how to write beautiful code with Object Pascal – or at least code that others find fits in with the generally accepted layout styling which is important if you work with a team or contribute to an Open Source project. How to format Delphi source code? Every developer writes code in their style. Since the Embarcadero compilers ignore any whitespace in which you can write the same code in hundreds of different ways, this can lead to unreadable source code. We can prevent this by applying default source code formatting or generate our formatting config file. While coding in the Code Editor, you can apply the Format Source context menu command to format the source code. Moreover, you can define your custom formatting style and save it to a config file. Then other team members can also utilize the same formatting style to make the source code maintainable. Check out the official documentation to learn more about this. Does Delphi have a package manager? If you have been […]

As I hope you’re aware by now – RAD Studio 11 Alexandria is now available! RAD Studio 11 contains a whole ton of features and it’s launching just ahead of Microsoft’s official release of the beautifully redesigned Windows 11. We wrote about the many great things contained in Windows 11 here on the blog before and how behind that gorgeously aesthetic user interface are a few traps and pitfalls which may be a problem for older legacy apps and hardware. Source: Microsoft One of the most obvious user interface changes is the fact that almost all app windows and many user interface controls will get a rounded corner effect applied to them. The amount of rounding of the application’s forms and things like text boxes, panels and group boxes will vary. Microsoft go into a lot more detail on how it will affect user interface components here in this article. They also have an article, here, which describes how the rounding of the application forms occurs and also how to turn that rounding feature on or off. Microsoft recognizes that some app windows are not going to work very well with rounding applied to the caption bar – for example tool window type application frames which typically have a very narrow height and custom-drawn window icons. Thinking ahead, Windows 11 provides a fairly easy to use Windows API which allows you full control over that rounding behavior – to turn it off, on, or ask Windows 11 to round the windows with a smaller radius. ‘Small’ Windows 11 Rounding Normal Windows 11 rounding The question came up during the RAD Studio 11 launch Q & A whether the Embarcadero team had an example of using that API. David (or Marco, it wasn’t clear) pasted a short example of how to do it in the question window but it was a little hard to read and only a partial example so I’ve taken that answer and built a more complete demo for you to download and play with. Just for fun it also shows Windows notifications using the TNotificationCenter component because if we’re going to be modern we might as well embrace a few of the other cool modern Windows things Delphi makes very easy. 😋 RAD Studio 11 Delphi example rounded corners app running on Windows 11 On versions of Windows before Windows 11 the API call will have no effect and your app Windows will still look the same. On Windows 11 the example app controls the main form Window based on your choices from a radio group. I’ve created a universal unit with a simple call in there – all you need to do is pass it a Window handle and Windows 11 will do your bidding. RAD Studio 11 is High DPI aware – so my screenshots look better now too! The example app is written in the new RAD Studio 11 Alexandria, of course, but it should work on earlier versions of Delphi. To use the code in your own apps simply download the source repository from the GitHub link below and include the “delphi_rounded_corners.pas” unit in your apps and make the procedure call. You can download the full source for the example RAD Studio 11 Delphi example application from here: https://github.com/checkdigits/rounded_corners RAD Studio 11 Alexandria […]

Delphi is technically a development environment powered by and for the Object Pascal programming language along with a suite of tools to enable high productivity and rapid application development. The ideas of the first version of Delphi originally began to emerge from Borland’s Turbo Pascal. However, it was decided that the object-oriented extensions that had been added to the Pascal language up to that point in time were not ideal, so the development team effectively started fresh and derived the language inspired by a broad number of ideas including those from Apple’s Object Pascal.  What is the killer feature of Delphi? Ultimately the drag and drop visual development of Delphi quickly demonstrated that such a visual approach was able to promote rapid visual app development for the users. Now, more than twenty five years on from those auspicious beginning, with hundreds of built-in visual and non-visual components, developers can rapidly design a master responsive UI layout once, then easily customize platform and device-specific views without redesigning the whole UI. This encapsulation of functionality into reusable components allowed for a low demand for actual writing code. Developers could – and still can – produce wholly, or mostly, complete applications with little or no code. It was, quite literally one of the original low code platforms. What do we mean by RAD Studio Delphi is a low code platform? If you would choose to create data-aware business applications, you can use enterprise-grade database components and a LiveBindings Designer to connect UI controls to data in a graphical high-level design way. The Live Binding mechanism is based on the observer model. It is built into the component library and gives access to any control that has a property that is able to interact with the live binding mechanism. This gives you, the developer, high productivity and a lightning-fast data-aware business application in seconds. Many business owners and app developers select Delphi because of being able to build stable products fast. The integration of Win32 API into Delphi’s Visual Component Library and its completeness gives a great environment on which to build native Windows programs. We can easily say that Delphi VCL is the number one library for building high-performance and native programs for Windows. Are Delphi applications really faster than other programs? To point out that speed is much better than most of the programming languages in the market. Delphi wins easily on speed because it compiles to native code which has a faster execution speed and much more rapid application startup. Where is Delphi used? Be sure to find out and learn about success stories by industries on the Embarcadero success stories web page. You can find thousands of businesses running with the power of Delphi and the Visual Component Library or FireMonkey framework behind them.           Health and Science Geology Retail Manufacturing Security Entertainment Transportation and more One thing that every business owner pointed out was the “Faster time to market for new product development” as the key to success. Are there a lot of programs still written in Delphi? Similarly, you can see and learn about hundreds of the latest mobile, desktop, web solution that made with Delphi. You can see beautifully designed and engineered applications that show the power of Delphi with VCL and cross-platform FMX framework […]

Wouldn’t it be nice to enhance your app with automatic language detection support for 173 languages? The Languagelayer is a simple and powerful REST API built to efficiently match text of any length to its corresponding language, cross-referencing single words, expressions and grammatical constructions, as well as taking into account any existing accents, dialects and other linguistic deviations. In this article we will see how fast and easy it is to use RAD Studio and Delphi to create a FireMonkey multidevice application using the LowCode Wizard in addition to a REST client library to take advantage of LanguageLayer API API and retrieve a JSON format response for automate language detection in real-time. Our RAD Studio and Delphi applications will be able to call the API and request information based on the name of parameters you provide. How do I set up the LanguageLayer API? Make sure you refer to LanguageLayer API website (https://LanguageLayer.com/) and and sign up for the free Plan (20 Requests/minute) providing only your email and some basic information (no credit card required). Once you are in the website will redirect you to a Quickstart guide dashboard and your API Access Key will be provided. The Access Key unique, personal and is required to authenticate with the API. Keep it safe! How do I call LanguageLayer API endpoints? Now all we need to do is to call the API base URL (http://api.languageLayer.com/) via a HTTP POST method with no JSON request body needed and some few requested parameters added to the URL address depending on the endpoint we choose to call. One can do that using REST Client libraries available on several programming languages. languageLayer offers one API endpoints to choose from: Detect: Will return information regarding the language of the query passed as parameter For a complete and detailed list of endpoints and its parameters make sure you refer to LanguageLayer Quickstart guide (https://languageLayer.com/quickstart) http://api.languageLayer.com/detect ? access_key = YOUR_ACCESS_KEY & query = I%20like%20apples%20%26%20oranges. // more parameters available please refer to the API Documentation (https://languageLayer.com/documentation) http://api.languageLayer.com/detect ? access_key = YOUR_ACCESS_KEY & query = I%20like%20apples%20%26%20oranges. // more parameters available please refer to the API Documentation (https://languageLayer.com/documentation) What does the LanguageLayer API endpoint return? After the call the main results will be as shown below. The languageLayer API’s live endpoint is used to get the latest rates for all available or a specific set of currencies. URL encoding is required in order to send the query text this means that a text like “I like apples & oranges.” should be passed as “I%20like%20apples%20%26%20oranges.”. { “success”: true, “results”: [{ “language_code”: “en”, “language_name”: “English”, “probability”: 83.896703655741, “percentage”: 100, “reliable_result”: true }]} { “success”: true, “results”: [{ “language_code”: “en”, “language_name”: “English”, “probability”: 83.896703655741, “percentage”: 100, “reliable_result”: true }]} How do I connect my applications to LanguageLayer API? Once you have followed basic steps to set up the LanguageLayer API we need to make sure we are able to connect and communicate with it before we start writing some code. RAD Studio Delphi and C++Builder make it very easy to connect to APIs as you can you REST Debugger to automatically create the REST components and paste them into your app. In Delphi all the job is done using 3 components tot make the API call. They are the TRESTClient, TRESTRequest, and TRESTResponse. Once […]