VSoft Technologies Blogs

I'm not usually one for publishing roadmaps, mostly because I don't like to promise something and not deliver. That said, we've had a few people ask recently what is happening with Continua CI. This post outlines our plans for the rest of 2018 and into the future.

New archiving functionality added to the workspace and repository rules in Continua CI

SSL standards are changing, and older SSL/TSL protocols are slowly being deprecated, or even turned off by some services. This post shows how to enable TLS 1.2 support in Continua CI.

The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update has only been out a few hours, but we're already getting questions about it. In our limited testing, FinalBuilder 8 and Automise 5 run fine. There is also some good news if you are a Delphi Developer.

In this post, I'm going to look at how to structure a FinalBuilder project so that it will run on your dev machine, or on your Continua CI Server without modification. This allows the best of both worlds, develop and debug your build process on your development machine, and then later run it on your CI server.

Continuous Integration Servers are often underspecified when it comes to hardware. In the early days of Automated Builds, the build server was quite often that old pc in the corner of the office, or an old server in the data center that no one else wanted. Developers weren't doing many builds per day, so it worked, it was probably slow but that didn't seem to matter much. Fast forward 20 years, and the CI server is now a critical service. The volume and frequency of builds has increased dramatically, and a slow CI server can be a real problem in an environment where we want fast feedback on that code we just committed (even though it "worked on my machine"). Continuous Deployment only adds to the workload of the CI server. In this post I'm going to cover off some ideas to hopefully improve the performance of your CI server.

In this post I'm going to look at Windows Manifest Files, what they do, why we need them and how to use them in Delphi and FinalBuilder. We often get asked questions about uac prompts, high dpi settings, windows themes etc when compiling Delphi & C++Builder projects in FinalBuilder. In this post we'll dissect windows manifest files, and look at how the project settings in Rad Studio interact with the manifest file, and why you should use a custom manifest file.

Over the last year or so, we have seen more and more "bug reports" about compiling Delphi projects with FinalBuilder, in particular, reporting issues with version info when using Delphi 10.1 (Berlin) and Delphi 10.2 (Tokyo).

The recent Visual Studio 2017 Update (also known as VS 15.3) introduced a problem with command line compilation when the Lightweight Solution Load feature is enabled. **Update 25 Sept 2017*** : Microsoft have closed our bug report with a Wont Fix status.. seems they are too busy with other things.

The Delphi/Object Pascal language really hasn't changed all that much in the last 20 years. This post describes some ideas to bring it into the current century.