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Delphi Software development

Making Delphi work with DCOM

In the past few days I had many troubles making our application work when the client was installed on a PC outside the application domain. It was due to several Delphi 2007 issues with DCOM. Usually, when a user was outside a domain we used TSocketConnection and the “Borland” Socket Server to establish the connection. “Outside” the domain usually […]

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Software development

The useful App Paths registry key

Yesterday on the Italian Delphi newsgroup run by Marco Cantù, Delphi&Dintorni, appeared a post asking how to load BPLs without writing them in the system directory or in the application directory. I suggested to use the “App paths” registry key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths], but while looking for a reference for its proper use I didn’t find a […]

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Software development

Windows Vista takes care of your weekends

Windows Vista changed the way it shutdowns. Developer should be aware of this change. Read at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms700677.aspx the rationale behind it: “If you take only one thing away from reading this topic, it should be this one. You will be presenting the best experience to your users if your application does not block shutdown. When users initiate shutdown, […]

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Software development

Lazy programmers, bad applications

A while ago, I had a discussion on a newsgroup about the reasons a programmer should call the correct API even if the same information were available elsewhere, in that case it was the paths of some special Windows folders, like Document & Settings or Program files. It was impossible to convince some programmers that […]