Installer tip

I'm really enjoying RAD Studio 10.4.2, but my journey with it got off to a less than wholesome start. I'd installed from the .iso download and put just a basic Windows platform support in. Shortly thereafter I wanted more target platforms installed so I chose Tools, Manage Platforms... and was disturbed to see this message:

O NOES!!11111!1!!!one!! (or some other geeky response)

Fortunately there was no corruption. This post is simply to pass on the tip of what to do if you happen to see this, instead of following the knee-jerk reaction of immediately uninstalling and reinstalling.

The issue here is misinformation. It's not necessarily corrupted at all - the installer displays this message if it cannot find the installation database file. When you installed RAD Studio the location of the installer file is written to the registry within this key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Embarcadero\BDS\21.0\CatalogRepository

The value ServicePath in that key points to a .gof file, in my case F:\radstudio_10_4_esd_104203a.gof. The thing is, I installed from a .iso file, which I mounted to a drive (F:) at the time and had since unmounted, ∴ that path no longer reached anything. Unfortunately the installer responded inappropriately: misinformation.

I gather this issue will be fixed for the 10.5 installer, but hopefully this saves someone the trouble of an uninstall and reinstall at some point.

SAPI (Microsoft Speech API) problems with the IDE

Every few months or so someone sends me an email telling me they've speech-enabled their application with SAPI (the Microsoft Speech API) after having read my old coverage (specifically that for SAPI 5.1) from conferences in 2002 and before. It's always good to hear that stuff you've worked on is being found useful, even long after you did it, in this case frighteningly close to 2 decades ago (Ͼ˳Ͽ)..!!!

Sometimes the communications are asking how to do specific things with SAPI - unfortunately those are typically a dead end, as I haven't used SAPI in anger for a long while.

Sometimes, though, people are stuck on the basics and I was recently contacted by someone with a fairly current version of RAD Studio saying they couldn't get started at all. It turns out that the current version of SAPI, SAPI 5.4, cannot be imported into RAD Studio!

Uh-oh. Time to investigate...

Deleaker: memory / resource leak detection and identification

As I've made clear many times in conference talks I’m a big fan of FastMM4, the full version Delphi’s built-in memory manager (I haven’t yet tried out FastMM5, which is fully rewritten but now has either a GPL or a commercial license). FastMM4 is great for identifying memory leaks, memory corruption, interface misuse and so on, and locating the source of the problem via a call stack. However it is true that the business of working through the FastMM4 reports is somewhat manual – reports and call stacks are sent out via debug strings or log flies and then you have to pore over the details and work things backward to the source of the problem. It does the job, but takes a back seat once the details have been discovered.

Some while back I got pointed in the direction of another leak detection tool, Deleaker from Softanics, of which I hadn't heard at that point. It’s taken me a while to clear my desk sufficiently to check it out but I’m pleased to have done so, as it’s a very nice and helpful tool.

I should mention up front that this is a commercial tool, like FastMM5 (when not used with the GPL license) and unlike FastMM4, Delphi LeakCheck, MemCheck ¹ and TCondom ². It costs $99 for a home license and $399 for a single developer license.

Some key points about Deleaker:

• It is not just a tool for EMBT development languages: it supports Delphi, C++Builder, Visual C++ and Qt Creator
• It’s not just a memory leak detector, but also supports resource leak detection for a pleasing array of resource types
• It is not just a library, but offers a full UI experience, either integrated into the IDE (RAD Studio, Visual Studio, Qt Creator) or standalone, or even controlled through a command-line utility for use in Continuous Integration setups
• It supports Win32 and Win64 targets

If you and/or your development team happens to dabble in C++Builder or Visual C++ then this tool would be a common weapon to deploy against leaks of all sorts.

The list of entity types that can be tracked looking for leaks is impressive:

Delphi and the WinRT API

WinRT

The WinRT (Windows Runtime) API was introduced with Windows 8, although it’s fair to say that most of us have tried our level best to forget that particular Windows release and pretend it never happened. Anyway, Microsoft has been trying to convince us that new Windows APIs will be introduced in the WinRT API and what we normally refer to as the Windows API might well remain as it is. We’ll see how true that becomes. The WinRT API reference can be found documented here.

The nice thing about WinRT is that it is not another step on the .NET journey; indeed it is nothing to do with .NET whatsoever. WinRT is implemented as native code and it is made available to whatever language wishes to consume it by language projections. Microsoft offers a C# language projection to consume it in .NET but it also offers a native C++ language projection (C++/WinRT).

Each WinRT class implements various interfaces to offer up methods and properties to call. There may also be static methods (i.e. class methods) and factory methods through which you can create an instance of the class. The Microsoft language projections make all the methods implemented through all the supported interfaces directly available once you create an instance of a WinRT class.

WinRT metadata

Anyone else can make their own language projections by analysing the API metadata (which are available in .winmd files in the C:\Windows\System32\WinMetadata folder). Metadata files are rather like COM type libraries in that they describe all the WinRT classes and methods etc., but they are actually files that share the same format as Win32 executables and .NET assemblies: PE files. You can find detailed information on these files from Microsoft here. Microsoft’s C++ .winmd file parser is open-sourced and available on github.

WinRT and Delphi

Embarcadero folks started looking at how to consume the WinRT API back in 2011 and Thom Gerdes wrote a few posts on how got on. He talks about these metadata files in this old post available on the Wayback Machine.

So, do we have a Delphi language projection? Well, kinda... We have import units that pull in a good chunk of the WinRT API, but things aren’t quite as transparent and trivial to use as they are in C++and C#. However, depending on how persistent we are we can get results. Indeed there are some uses of the WinRT API in the Delphi / C++Builder RTL; it is used for Windows desktop notifications and for share contracts.

This post looks into how we might use the WinRT API directly to perform a simple task, namely to trigger a Windows notification message. This might seem an odd thing to do, given the RTL already covers this quite nicely in the TNotificationCenter class but it serves as a simple, visual example.

25 Delphi Tips for 25 Years of Delphi

It seems funny to think Delphi is 25 years old, and yet sure enough the celebrations are ongoing for the 25th Anniversary of its unveiling on 14th February 1995.

As it happens I've been part of the Delphi world for around 26 years now, as I used to work at Borland and was involved with testing and experimenting with and working with the pre-release versions.

What can I say other than Happy Birthday, Delphi? You've been a good friend to me over this last quarter of a century and I've been happy to be part of your world.

Some number of posts ago I wrote up 10 Tips for Delphi Users. When I checked I was horrified to find this was 7 years ago! (My, my, how time flies when you're having fun...) Anyway, I thought I'd take that list and build upon it, expanding it up to 25 tips for Delphi users, which is what we have here. So without further ado let's get straight into the list.

The Enter key and the OnKeyDown/OnKeyUp events on Android

A problem surfaced on Stack Overflow recently from a Delphi developer, Tom Byrnes, who discovered that on Android, the Enter (or Return) key no longer triggers the OnKeyDown and OnKeyUp events. This was unfortunate as Tom wanted to code to run in (one of) those handlers.

The problem had been reported as RSP-27496 but alas it had been closed at the time Tom was hunting for a solution (to my mind closed wrongly).

What to do?

Well, after some valiant fighting with the problem accompanied with the inevitable wailing and gnashing of teeth, Tom found a workaround of sorts. Setting the TEdit control's ReturnKeyType property Go, Search or Send allows the OnKeyDown event to fire for the Enter key. Good stuff! But not ideal....

I sent a note to a relevant party within EMBT and after reviewing the report it has since been re-opened. That's a start.

C++Builder's Android location sensor woes

There is an unfortunate problem with RAD Studio 10.3.3 for anyone using C++Builder building Android applications. However it has a quite straightforward resolution, so let's look at what the issue is.

If you make a new Multi-Device Application in C++Builder and build it, all will be well, of course. The basics work very nicely.

If you now drop a TLocationSensor component on the form and try to build now, the result will be different. Compilation goes fine. Linking looks like it is going fine.... until it fails with a rather unhelpful message:

[ldandroid Error] "ld" exited with code 1.

Let's look at how we can get more useful feedback from this rather opaque and somewhat 1990s error message and see how to resolve the underlying problem.