VSoft Technologies Blogs

In December 2019, I about a package manager for Delphi that I have been working on. This post is a progress update that shows where it's at and what's left to do to get to v1.

We use many third-party Delphi libraries to build FinalBuilder and Automise, and that brings plenty of issues when upgrading compiler versions. I've been using Delphi since 1995, both as a user and as a component vendor, I have learned a thing or two about creating libraries that I would like to share.

Back in Feb 2019, I blogged about the need for a Package Manager for Delphi. The blog post garnered lots of useful feedback and encouragement, but until recently I could never find a solid block of time to work on it. Over the last few weeks I've been working hard to get it to an mvp stage.

In this post, we'll take a look at the various options for managing and updating Version Info in Delphi projects using FinalBuilder.

Back in December 2016, I posted some ideas for some Delphi language enhancements. That post turned out to be somewhat controversial, I received some rather hostile emails about how I was trying to turn Delphi into C#. That certainly wasn't my intent, but rather to modernize Delphi, in a way that helps me write less, but more maintainable code. Nearly 2 years later, Delphi 10.3 Rio actually implements some of those features.

Delphi/Rad Studio desperately needs a proper package/library/component manager. A package manager provides a standardized way of consuming third party libraries. At the moment, use of third party libraries is very much adhoc, and in many cases this makes it difficult to move projects between machines, or to get a new hire up and running quickly. Other development eco systems, like Ruby, .net and Javascript, recognised and solved this problem many years ago. Getting a Ruby, .net or Javascript project up an running, in a new working folder or new machine is trivial.

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 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 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.